EMMA VICCARS

Responsibilities

• Developing and leading execution of strategies to improve experience for DPE’s employees and customers.
• Strategies include: Machinery of Government (MoG) Employee Engagement, Resetting our vision and values, Launching a new Employee Value Proposition, Communications and engagement strategy for the People and Culture team, including the launch of a Customer Satisfaction Survey.

Achievements

• MoG Employee Sentiment Survey - 1, 500 responses, 211 EOIs to attend MoG Focus Groups.
• MoG Employee Focus Groups – delivered 7 focus groups around NSW with over 100 staff participating, 50 people provided feedback with 90% rating their experience as Excellent or Good.
• People and Culture Customer Satisfaction Survey – 58 responses in the first month after launch.

Responsibilities

• Leading a team of five to develop, execute and evaluate end-to-end culture-building campaigns and communication strategies for staff across the cluster
• Working with senior executives to lead development and delivery of change communication strategies for major initiatives including COVID 19 and DPE's mandatory vaccination policy
• Providing strategic communications advice and delivery of town halls for the Deputy Secretary, People, Performance and Culture (PPC), Corporate Services (CS) and Legal Counsel
• Creating a high-performance team culture through use of analytics, post-campaign reviews and Gartner resources to constantly evolve ways of working
• Managing digital channels including Yammer and the intranet: developing channel strategies, governance frameworks and running content audits to ensure accurate and user-centred employee channels
• Collaborating with divisional internal communications leads across the department to align strategic messaging for central campaigns, support innovation and share internal communications best practice
• Facilitating major safety campaigns including leading development of emergency safety alerts protocols, working with Director of Safety and Chief People Officer. Protocols have been deployed in response to major weather
• events, and DPE's response to COVID-19.

Key achievements

• OurDPIE - led the development of a strategy to launch DPIE’s vision
  and values. We engaged 78% of our 10,000-strong workforce with our
  vision and values on launch day and 65% of employees tuned into
  our Live sessions on internal social media platform Workplace.PMES scores for values related questions increased on average by 6.2% in the two surveys
  following the launch.
• COVID-19 communications - provided direct strategic advice and
  internal communication support to Deputy Secretary-level Crisis
  Management Team leaders in response to COVID-19. This included
  the development of a change communication strategy to support the
  rollout of a highly contentious mandatory vaccination program.
• AbilityAware – led the development of a six-month, centre-piece
  campaign for the Secretary to build a more inclusive culture for staff
  with disability. Benchmarking results demonstrated a 32% increase in
  awareness of disability inclusion programs and a 16.5% uplift in the belief
  that DPIE was a supportive place for people with disability. 14 new staff
  members with disability were also hired during the campaign period.
• Reduced information fatigue across the department with the
  creation of two fortnightly bulletins for staff and leaders. They have
  become the single source of truth for need-to-know information for
  DPE employees, with an average open rate of 65%. The bulletins
  are supported by regular editorial meetings with key stakeholders,
  resulting in strong relationships and content aligned to DPE's priorities.
• The People Matter Employee Survey (PMES) – in addition to
  overseeing delivery of the annual campaign to encourage staff to take
  the survey, I also led the development of a campaign which resulted in
  a 10% increase in the score for the ‘Action on results’ question from 2020
  to 2021, 14% higher than the sector average.
• The Daring Ideas Challenge – a call for ‘daring’ ideas to bring our daring
  value to life. 46% of our people engaged with the program with: 80 ideas
  submitted, 64 staff members nominating themselves to collaborate on
  the development of business cases for the top six ideas and more than
  2, 500 staff members watching the Shark-Tank style finale.
  Developed an employee restructure communications framework
  to provide best practice change communication guidance to internal
  communications staff across the department.

Responsibilities

• Directing and managing the newly formed DPIE Central Internal Communication team.
• Developing internal communication strategies for the Corporate Services and People, Performance and Culture directorates, to build employee culture and empower managers to lead effectively.
• Writing and reviewing senior leadership communications for the Secretary, Deputy Secretary PPC and Legal Counsel.

Key achievements

• Creation of a new operating model for delivering internal communications and uniting two internal comms teams from the former departments.
• Providing direction and delivery of internal crisis communications to deputy secretaries during the November 2019 bush-fire emergency.
  

Responsibilities

• Representing the Department of Planning on a cross-agency Communication Steering Group, supporting the July 2019 Machinery of Government which merged the Department of Planning and Environment and Department of Industry
• Leading development and delivery of end-to-end internal communications strategies and campaigns
• Developing agenda and content for the Secretary's quarterly leadership forum
• Managing, coaching and mentoring junior team members
• Drafting major all-staff communications from the Secretary and leadership team to an audience of approximately 3,000 staff.

Key achievements

• Development of a change communication strategy supporting the
  formation of the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment.
• Creation of the first DPIE narrative.

Responsibilities

• Providing strategic internal communications advice to two general managers (GM)
• Developing internal communication strategies promoting new products to employees
• Writing GM communications, newsletters and intranet stories
• Development and delivery of change communication strategies for team restructures
• Strategic advice on content and agenda for GM town halls
• Supporting new intranet build for Insurance and Superannuation teams.

Key achievements

• Delivery of four GM town halls rated as ‘Very good’ or ‘Excellent’ by 80%
  of participants.
• Successful change communications for four restructures which included
  staff redundancies.

Responsibilities

• Developing and implementing internal communications strategies for 50,000+ staff
• Developing and executing change communication strategies across the Group.

Key achievements

• Launch of new employee portal One.CBA which won the 2017
  global Gold Quill Award for Excellence in the Change Communication
  category. Results included: 100% of participants feeling ‘adequately
  prepared’ for the change in a pre-launch readiness survey. 22,000
  people viewing over 141,000 pages by 3.30pm on launch day. Only four
  calls to the IT Service Desk during launch week. Zero calls to the IT
  Service Desk when mobile app launched.
• One Commbank employee engagement campaign to create
  awareness and understanding of the One CommBank program. A
  benchmarking survey revealed 78% of employees across the Group had
  a good understanding of what One CommBank was three months into
  the campaign.