How a university digitized their communications with Workplace
At Australian Catholic University (ACU), it’s about seeing the whole person and their full potential, and inspiring staff, students and graduates to make a difference. The national university was founded in 1991 based on the Catholic values of truth, compassion, dignity for others, and a commitment to upholding the common good.
One of their biggest challenges was finding a way to bring together the 2,500 researchers, educators, and support staff who work across ACU’s eight campuses. In addition, the university wanted to break down the siloes between faculty and professional staff.
With Workplace for Good, educational institutions such as ACU have full Workplace Premium membership for free, along with the features, support, and enterprise-grade security that comes with it.
Workplace Results
76%
of staff said their sense of connectedness improved with Workplace
63%
of staff said that Workplace created more opportunities to collaborate
13%
decrease in perceived reliance on email
How Workplace helped
Turning environmental sustainability ideas into action
For ACU’s National Sustainability Manager, Mark Doggett, Workplace was the perfect platform on which to rally university staff together and combat the issue of landfill caused by disposable coffee cups. Mark created the group ‘Sustainability @ ACU’ which gained strong traction across internal departments. His regular posts in the group often used humor to encourage interaction in the form of likes, comments and suggestions and gave a real sense of urgency to the issue.
Within two and a half months, Mark and his colleagues were able to convince all cafe operators on campus to offer people a discount on using reusable cups, instead of their environmentally harmful counterparts.
Opening up inter-departmental dialogues
Due to the siloed organizational structure of the university, staff often felt disconnected from each other. Many departments operate as self-sufficient units, with lecturers, researchers and professional staff collaborating inwardly on their own curriculum and services.
Workplace has opened up a new kind of peer-to-peer dialogue and inter-departmental knowledge sharing that did not exist at the university before. Within just four months of adopting Workplace, 76% of staff in the pilot rollout said their sense of connectedness had improved and 63% said that Workplace created more opportunities to collaborate.
Letting go of old-school communication tools
For ACU, traditional methods of communication had started to feel outdated and restrictive.
Implementing Workplace was a simple way to make ACU more digitally savvy and to invigorate their internal communications. With familiar features like a News Feed, profile pages, and tagging options, staff were quickly able to become familiar with Workplace and start trialing new ways of working that didn’t include emails and newsletters. After four months of piloting Workplace, ACU reported a 13% decrease in perceived reliance on email and a 33% improvement in staff saying that ACU’s communication channels made it easy to share updates on projects.
“Workplace has opened up a new kind of peer-to-peer dialogue and inter-departmental knowledge sharing that did not exist at the university before. Within just four months of adopting Workplace, 76% of staff in the pilot rollout said their sense of connectedness had improved and 63% said that Workplace created more opportunities to collaborate.”
Talk to us about the future or work within your organisation
At Enablo, we help leading organizations digitize the world of work. Through our partnerships with Workplace from Meta, Asana and Google Workspace, we’ve helped hundreds of organizations transform their culture and the way they work. Get in touch if you are looking to adapt to the future of work! We’ll show you how to break unhealthy workplace habits and keep you accountable with the tools you need to help transform workplace culture for your distributed workforce.