Aviva employees come together on their global intranet

By Daniel Penton

You sit up and take notice when Steve Balmer name checks a company for its innovative use of Microsoft SharePoint. That’s exactly what the Microsoft CEO did a couple of months back when he was delivering a talk on Cloud Computing at the University of Washington in Seattle.

What may surprise some is that he wasn’t referring to a well-known US company operating on Microsoft’s doorstep. Instead an insurance company thousands of miles away – UK-based Aviva – was being singled out for praise by the one below Bill Gates. One of the reasons for the kudos was the launch the previous year of a brand new intranet based on SharePoint, which held a 24-hour all-employee event to celebrate the launch of the Aviva brand.
 
Known by a different name

The world’s fifth largest insurance company wasn’t always known as Aviva. In 2009 it underwent a significant rebrand, culling the various monikers it went by in markets around the globe – the most well known of which was Norwich Union.
 
The ad campaign announcing the change to the public garnered both critics and plaudits alike for its use of celebrities who changed their names, including Walter Willis, Vincent Damon Furnier and Eleanor Nancy Gow – better known as Hollywood actor Bruce Willis, rock star Alice Cooper and supermodel Elle Macpherson respectively – all chosen to illustrate the good a name change can do.

Bringing external and internal together

June 2 2009, the day after the official external rebrand, was the day that Aviva decided to hold its internal launch, ‘Becoming One Aviva’ (BOA). For Lynne Gray, Internal Communications Director, who oversaw the event, the objective was clear: for everybody to become unified and to celebrate the name change together.

Reaching all 46,000 staff from Australia to America and everywhere in between on the same day is difficult in the best of times. But the challenge was made harder by presenting the event in the middle of the worst recession in living memory.

Finding a common bond

So how did Aviva engage all its employees around the world in one day? Like many organisations they looked for the common link across the businesses and saw the global intranet as a way to reach every employee.

Andrew Moss, the CEO of Aviva was a key driver behind the creation of the intranet – known as Aviva World. “He played a crucial role when he outlined his vision to creat 'One Aviva' as a more joined up and collaborative organisation. The mandate from the outset was to create a global intranet. Andrew saw it as a way of linking everyone across the business together,” Gray remembers.

Jamming day and night

Aviva came up with a jam-like solution - launching a dedicated microsite which the intranet automatically linked to, any time an employee logged in during the 24-hour BOA event.

“For Becoming One Aviva, we took inspiration from the IBM Jams – Big Blue’s regular internal brainstorming event, where everyone from the company brainstorms on set topics from values to innovation,” remembers Will Betts, Head of Global IT Services Operations and Change.

SharePoint Twitter

Aviva’s microsite consisted of several different elements including ‘Have Your Say’: a Twitter-like news feed that visitors around the world could update. The scroll could be found at the top of the microsite’s homepage throughout BOA.

Also adding to the global event feel for users on the home page was a unique Aviva daylight map which displayed where the sun was shining throughout the day on the Aviva Empire.

A strong interactive element on the site was made possible by employees uploading their own images and pictures, as well as posting and commenting on a variety of topics centered around BOA.

From sunrise in Melbourne to sunset in Chicago

BOA began in Melbourne at 9am local time and finished at the end of the working day local time in Chicago. Overseeing the web activities for each region during its allotted timeslot was a master of ceremonies who commented using a real-time chat facility.

Joining these MC’s were senior leaders around the group who also reported the activities in their country, including parties and picnics. One of these leaders was Andrew Moss, who was in Singapore at the time, but still participated in a town hall with local employees. 

The largest concentration of Aviva employees is in the UK and Europe so unsurprisingly, over 200 photographs from the BOA event were received from Europe alone. To make sure everything ran smoothly over the course of the 24 hours, IT experts and communication professionals were hard at work at Aviva’s London headquarters. 

A growing integral channel

From this day back in June 2009, Aviva’s intranet has continued to become an important communications channel for the global corporation. Four people at group level work exclusively on the intranet overseeing management of forums, editorial, group news and co-ordination of content flow which is managed regionally.

The introduction of employee forums has helped to create an open culture while building communities. Colleagues are given the freedom  to write posts on anything they like.

This popular area of the intranet is viewed by over 60% of users, partly helped by the fact that articles contain questions or threads, automatically created for employees to comment on.

The forums are also saving time when it comes to answering customer questions – colleagues are able to conduct a simple forum search to get people the answeres they need quickly.

The success of these forums has been a bit of a surprise for Gray.

“I didn’t realise how much they would be used,” she points out.  “No publicity, no training, everyone just started using them.”

Everything is good in moderation

A frequent worry for corporations when it comes to forums is moderation. Aviva has a refreshingly open approach to this. “We held steadfast to our desire to be open and it has worked,” says Claire Scott, Head of Online Internal Communications. “We’ve had very little trouble on the forums and operate a three strikes rule, where if you write something that does not meet the guidelines you get two warnings before being banned.” There is an immediate ban for serious offences.

The intranet is still developing rapidly with significant upgrades due in 2010 including the next version of SharePoint, introduction of video, and the creation of global professional communities cutting across traditional organizational and geographical boundaries. Much has been achieved and the future looks even brighter for the intranet.

More immediately is the anniversary of BOA, another 24-hour global event featuring some similar elements to the 2009 event but providing significantly more engaging and collaborative elements such as video.

Give ownership and get people engaged

And what advice does Gray have for other communication directors when it comes to running a successful intranet?

“It’s to do with as much collaboration as possible. If it’s just a corporate mouthpiece it dies.  If people can take it on in their own way they take ownership,” Gray says.

“When we started we didn’t try to own it all. We told the subject owners how we would not update their site areas; it was down to them. We also engaged a wider community involved through the forums. It was two-way communication from the start.“

Gray continues, “We launched the intranet very quickly – in 100 days – from start to finish. This meant that there were many problems to be fixed in the first few months, but what we were able to do was to launch when the enthusiasm and excitement were there, when people were prepared to take the risk.” 

Aviva’s intranet started with a big bang and is still reaching for the stars. Like any good intranet, it is never finished and there are many plans to improve it in the coming weeks and months to ensure that it maintains its place as an enterprise-leading intranet strong enough to catch the eye of a world-famous CEO.