We needed to harness the power of Australia Post’s values, connect front-line team members to Australia Post’s strategy and give front-line leaders skills to empower their teams, leveraging the pride and care Australia Post team members feel for their job to deliver “customer-obsessed” service every day.
Profitability and growth challenges motivated employee engagement changes
The last few years have tested Australia Post and its people. Its core businesses, delivering mail and local post office transactions, are in decline in both volume and profitability. As a government business enterprise, Australia Post must reinvest all profit.
Its main challenge is to deliver profitability and focus on growth while facing major structural changes, coupled with changing customer and community expectations; customers care about the future of our planet, want free, fast parcel returns and processes that are easy to use.
Along with a new CEO, Australia Post is undergoing a monumental transformation to reimagine the post office, shifting from “A mail business that delivers some parcels” (a declining letters business) to “A parcel business that delivers some mail” (investing in the booming parcel business).
A multi-year employee engagement program was the answer
Australia Post created the Post26 strategy built around three imperatives:
- Supporting our people
- Delighting our customers and communities
- Creating a sustainable future
To make Post26 a reality, Australia Post needed to activate the vital ingredient – its people! Throughout its history, Australia Post’s workforce has been at the core of what makes Australia Post successful.
To achieve this, we created Our AP Way, a multi-year engagement program.
Our AP Way identified the cultural pillars to hold on to, the attributes to build or amplify, and the cultural aspects which needed bypassing.
We articulated our vision and journey through a visually engaging, repeatable, one-page story.
- Why: Australia Post’s challenges and a ‘fork in the road’ decision: adapt and thrive or deny and decline
- What: The Post26 strategy
- How: Our AP Way Culture
Our AP Way story is the program’s foundation, enabling leaders to repeat the eleven “do-or-die” messages and articulate the why for all decisions made across the business.
Knowing that people wanted a clear direction forward, we developed the Our AP Way GPS, a behavioural navigator based on the three Post 26 strategic imperatives. The GPS let people question if they’re working with or against the strategy.
In keeping with Australia Post’s purpose of Delivering a Better Tomorrow, we created a digitally enabled half-day engagement session introducing everyone to Our AP Way’s foundations.
The purpose was to create an understanding of how Australia Post’s customers are central to the strategy and how to use the Our AP Way GPS to bring the strategy to life.
We also designed and developed:
- A self-directed digital adventure using 360 technologies to embed and reach a contracted workforce
- Online versions of all sessions for employees in remote areas of Australia, using a bespoke virtual classroom platform
- A communications campaign to support the key messages with tools to communicate Our AP Way at briefings and meetings
Australia Post’s Employee Opinion Survey showed the program positively influenced the overall employee experience with a pronounced uplift on:
- Values (This organisation does the right thing by its employees)
- Community (I am proud of how Australia Post supports the community)
- Communication (I receive sufficient information about what is happening at Australia Post)
Strong collaboration and cohesion within the workforce are evident. Qualitatively, feedback from team members who completed Our AP Way highlighted their support of and commitment to the program.
95.1%
agreed or strongly agreed that they’re committed to bringing Our AP Way to life by using the GPS
98%
expressed commitment to leading Our AP Way and keeping their team and colleagues on track