How Telstra leveraged the power of recognition to become a more agile, engaged and connected workplace

Telstra, Australia’s leading telecommunications and technology company, employs 25,000 plus employees and has an international presence spanning over 20 countries.

Business challenge

Prior to partnering with Achievers, Telstra used a rewards and recognition platform for eight years for peer-to-peer recognition. However, with the rapid advances in technology and industry shifts, the needs of the organisation, and its customers, had significantly changed.

New ways of working had exposed limitations in the platform and the opportunity for recognition program design simplification and digitisation of all recognition programs. Telstra wanted a high frequency recognition solution that was fully integrated and connected, reinforcing a global employee engagement experience.

Telstra decided to embark on a future-focused transformation strategy, referred to internally as “T-22”. A major part of the transformation involved switching to an ‘agile’ way of working.

As a result of the new strategy, many leaders who were previously people managers and led big functions of the business became ‘leaders of work’ with no people directly reporting to them. This resulted in disrupting the traditional line manager structure making recognition even more important. Telstra needed the non-people leaders to be able to recognise and thank people outside of the direct line and wanted multiple ways to recognise, celebrate people and capture those moments. It became especially important to empower all leaders to feel that they could recognise and thank people but also pull that data in a systematized way to help inform conversations around things like performance reviews, salary discussions and career progression.

Achievers Employee Engagement Platform™

As Telstra continued to evolve from a telco leader to a technology leader, they were on the lookout for a solution that would complement new ways of working and collaborating, including adoption of Agile.

Achievers stood out thanks to its superior mobile applications and ability to integrate with many of the company’s existing workplace applications including Workday, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Outlook.

Telstra transitioned from their legacy platform to Achievers and rolled out their recognition and reward program ‘Appreciate’ globally. The key goal of the program was to improve the frequency and value of recognition in ways that positively impact the engagement and performance of its people. Telstra’s focus was on increasing the frequency and value of social recognition with behaviours being recognised in line with the company’s 4 core values:

On how recognition helped people change

The shifting of people from direct to indirect leadership of teams was an incredibly disruptive moment both emotionally and culturally for many leaders at Telstra.

Business impact

At Telstra, leaders always talk about the ‘what’ and the ‘how,’ with what being the hard deliverables and how being the behaviours. Appreciate is deeply tied to the behavioural elements. By implementing the Achievers recognition solution, Telstra has been able to closely align their employee recognition and rewards program with their values, resulting in a fun, engaging, and connected workplace.

At Telstra, connectivity and integration are fundamental to their employees feeling connected and assimilated. Another attractive element of the Achievers platform was its turnkey integration with Workday as a Certified Solution Partner. The integration was simple and seamless with Telstra’s existing Workday application resulting in recognitions from the program being integrated into Workday’s Feedback module to enable use of the recognition related data as an evidence-based component to inform performance conversations.

In addition, Telstra uses the employee analytics reports available through the system to gain actionable insight into employee sentiment, with the ability to drill down to locations or populations within the organisation and identify opportunities for recognition at critical moments in the employment lifecycle.

On its role in helping create a more agile and connected workforce

The platform has helped break barriers and silos making a powerful impact especially on cross functional teams in helping them recognise in the moment which was previously not possible.

On its role in capturing and actioning recognition related data

• Capturing recognition data has become an important feature influencing performance, salary, and career progression conversations at Telstra.
• New starter recognition related data has proven insightful in understanding if they have embraced the cultural fabric of the organisation.
• The data has also helped identify gaps and intervention opportunities across certain cohorts who haven’t engaged or interacted enough.

Key statistics

In one quarter alone, $1.5 million dollars’ worth of points were redeemed Telstra has a huge take up of points because it is linked to a catalogue that includes, retailers, experiences, prepaid gift cards, Telstra products and services.

On using the platform to give back to the community

In Australia, one common feature that happens every year, unfortunately, is fire or flood. During such tough times, several teams at Telstra are out there helping restore connections and connectivity which is important and critical to communities during tragic times.

• The platform has been used to recognise a collective of these amazing people from Telstra who do remarkable things in such moments. ‘Appreciate’ also helps employees link through broader social issues or challenges when different countries we operate in are impacted by natural disasters.

• Employees can donate their ‘Appreciate’ points to charities that are supporting other countries. The platform is used in dynamic ways to give our people are real sense of purpose and citizenship in giving back to the community.

On incorporating reward with recognition and what employees enjoy spending their points on

Leaders have a monthly budget and can choose what number of points to allocate so that they can differentiate depending on how significant the contribution is.

• Points are allocated to endorse recognition in multiple ways – recognition, service anniversaries, formal nomination awards, special events, company-endorsed ‘one off’ activities such as their response to Covid and encouraging people to be double vaccinated via a points contribution in Appreciate.

On employee retention

In spite of declining global employee engagement benchmarks, engagement at Telstra has been growing quarter on quarter for the last eight quarters which indicates that the present ecosystem impacting employee engagement and experience is working well. The great resignation commentary has been out there for some time but has not impacted Telstra much.

• Employee turnover sits at below 10% at a total organisational level that includes bulk workforces across call centers, field and retail staff which have higher turnover rates.

• The company has long tenured employees and recognition remains one of the important dimensions among several others that has helped improve their overall employee value proposition.

On maintaining and building culture in a hybrid environment

A personal recognition story Alex Badenoch, Group Executive Transformation, Communications & People

Most senior executives do not often receive enough feedback. No matter how senior someone is or what role they play the sense of feeling valued and appreciated is meaningful and good for the soul. Everyone is human and relies on feedback cues to improve and get better.

One of the lovely moments for Alex was when she received a recognition for taking time out to help with a coaching session for someone who was not part her function. The recognition really made her feel great and resulted her in getting more active on the platform.