How Ventia Connected its 15,000-Strong Dispersed Workforce

Transcript: "Hi, my name is Sarah McCarthy. I'm the General Manager for Brand and Engagement at Ventia. So Ventia is probably a really large organisation that many of your viewers may not know. We're one of Australia and New Zealand's largest essential services providers. So what does that mean? If you think about all the critical infrastructure that touches you on your everyday, we're the business behind the scenes who are making that work. So whether it's the water that flows into your homes, electricity that powers your house, keeping hospitals and roads and other infrastructure running, it's our people who work around the the clock to make that work."

"So, the Ventia workforce is around 15,000 people and we are spread all across Australia and New Zealand. So as far north as Darwin, as far south as Dunedin, as far west as Perth and beyond. And so it was really important for us to find a product that we can roll out to our employees across both Australia and New Zealand. Also, if I reflect on our workforce, our workforce is predominantly wages based, so 70% of our workforce are based out on the field, working directly for our clients. So again, it was really important to find a product which could offer something both for our desktop-based employees and our wages workforce. And so the Reward Gateway, product, both the desktop application and the app, really did tick all those boxes."

"So I am so passionate about employee experience, as is our People and and Capability teams. And I think in this current climate of, cost of living, a platform like Reward Gateway has been fantastic. We saw a huge uptake, leading up to Christmas and predominantly around those vendors like a Woolworths and Coles where people were looking to make savings on their everyday costs. Common theme that comes up in our Have Your Say employee survey is around rewards and benefits and recognition. And if an organisation like ours can give something small back to our people, that's fantastic."

"Ventia is a very large organisation, and we are constantly hiring. And I know for our recruitment team, the ability to talk about a benefits program, which is eligible to all our direct employees, is a fantastic selling tool for our organisation. We've also been able to combine some of our other benefits that we leverage through our procurement piece. So that allows us to give a really fantastic platform, which is both savings and discounts and other recognition pieces. The other fantastic piece that we started piloting last year was the concept of giving points and rewards. And so that was, we had fantastic uptake. We use that as part of our venture rewards program as part of the prize portfolio. And as a result of that, we're seeing an uptick now in usage by our employees too."

"So the journey that Ventia went on to finally land on Reward Gateway wasn't a short one. So my biggest piece of advice is around that executive sponsorship. And secondly, having data and metrics to support the rationale for a product like this. So we use the results from our Have Your Say survey. Where we go out annually and speak to our employees about what's important to them. And that data really becomes part of that business case as to the reason why something like this is important."

"I would absolutely recommend Reward Gateway to other organisations. I think it's been, it's easy to use, it's accessible on mobile. I also love the fact that there is continuous improvement. So we've given some direct feedback about, for example, the gift vouchers, not being able to see what the value was. That feedback's been adopted. Love that Apple Pay is now connected to the app as well. That is a huge difference. You don't need to have a separate phone and app and credit card all at the same time. So, yes, answer is yes. It's something I log into at least on a weekly basis myself."