Reworked TV
In Brief
- Internal communications is a service, not just a channel — Martin advocated for a mindset shift from providing links to providing a service so all stakeholders had a better understanding of the purpose of the platform.
- Learning in the crowd — Change management doesn't have to be loud or obvious to succeed. Sometimes a stealth approach is just as effective.
- Visible leadership and authentic communications build trust — Having senior leadership involved and visible helped speed adoption, as did setting the tone to allow the human side show.
The Scottish Funding Council's Martin Stubbs-Partridge joins me to discuss the lead up to the launch of the government agency's first intranet and enterprise social network. Martin's efforts in bringing this vision for a new approach to internal communications led him to be recognized as Reworked IMPACT's Employee Experience Leader of the Year for 2025.
We explore some of his decision making process along the way, how he navigated an unexpected setback and the results to date. Tune in for more.
Table of Contents
- Introducing Reworked IMPACT's 2025 Employee Experience Leader of the Year
- Scottish Funding Council Background
- The Ask: Improve Internal Communications
- Building Trust Through Incremental Wins
- Advice for Internal Communications Pros
- An Interim Intranet to Start
- How We Decided on Viva Engage
- A Two-Phased Rollout
- Rolling With the Setbacks
- Results Post-Viva Engage Rollout
- A Look at Next Stages for the Digital Employee Experience
- A Switch to a Service Provider Mindset
- Cultural Impact, Dogs and Cats Style
Introducing Reworked IMPACT's 2025 Employee Experience Leader of the Year
Siobhan Fagan: Hi everybody and welcome to today's episode of Three Dots. I'm your host Siobhan Fagan and I am really excited about our guest today because he is our Reworked Impact Employee Experience Award winner of the year 2025, Martin Stubbs-Partridge. Martin is an internal communications officer at the Scottish Funding Council. Martin, welcome to today's show.
Martin Stubbs-Partridge: Thank you very much for inviting me along and thank you very much for everybody that supported my award win. Very much appreciate it, was quite unexpected.
Siobhan: It was great to speak to you in advance of the award, and I'm glad that we can now share your story with the audience. So let's start with a little bit about what the Scottish Funding Council does, because it's quite an interesting organization.
Scottish Funding Council Background
Martin: To put it in context, Scottish Funding Council is a government agency. It's what's called a non-departmental body. So essentially, it sits slightly arm's length from the Scottish government. That gives us the freedom to be impartial and to advise government and our ministers.
Our role is to fund tertiary education in Scotland. So that's all post-16 education. So that's universities, colleges and also provide leadership around research and innovation. So for example, where a university might be looking to do a public private venture to get an innovation center off the ground, whether it's for medical research, or some sort of scientific green technology and venture, then we can also support through expertise, but also through steeple and funding to help that.
We have the second biggest budget of any government department, especially in Scotland. We handle in the region of two billion pounds of taxpayers' money every year to facilitate those sort of outcomes across social education in Scotland.
We are a very small organization, just under 200 of us. But what we actually deliver has societal impact for people in Scotland.
Siobhan: Small but mighty! So you joined Scottish Funding Council just a few years ago, correct?
Martin: Yes, September 2023, I joined the organization.
Siobhan: And you were brought in specifically to work on the project that led to you winning this award. So can you talk a little bit about why you were brought on?
Martin: The organization is going through what I would call transformation and layers of transformation.
Firstly, we're working at a sector level. There are other agencies in our sector across government and we're looking to reform the way the funding body landscape works in Scotland including funding for apprenticeships for people who haven't gone to college or haven't gone to university, but are looking to do more practical ways of getting into the job market.
There's a whole sector reform program going on across government, and we are going to get larger as an organization as a result of that reform. SFC will grow in size, but also grow in terms of what it does and the budget that it holds.
Secondly, to ensure that we're ready for that sector reform, the organization itself is transforming the way that it works to ensure that its processes, its governance, its communication, its human resources, its IT. A huge amount of investment is going into the organization at the moment to help it get ready for that kind of new venture and new challenge.
The Ask: Improve Internal Communications
Siobhan: So you're setting the groundwork for this expansion of the organization's reach and also just the amount of people you will be dealing with. So what specifically is it that you're doing? What is the project?
Martin: My job came out of not only that requirement, but also that colleagues themselves agreed that internal communication as a whole in the organization needed to improve. Both the user and the business came together at the same time to say internal communication isn't great.
So I've joined the organization to essentially design a completely new internal communication suite of services. And to give you a picture of that, that previously has really been from email. Push and broadcast type comms through to ensuring that leaders are very visible and are able to engage and communicate across the organization really easily in between different formal engagements.
Once a month, for example, meeting where everyone comes together to understand what's going on strategically. That shift from email to digital employee experience in 18 months is essentially what I've been leading.
Siobhan: Is email still part of it?
Martin: It is still part of it, but I think that the phrase that I use is we're repositioning email to do the job that it's designed to do. You know, you're communicating with external stakeholders, but more importantly, internally, it's becoming a notification tool for the communications that are being done digitally and still trying to chip away at reducing those email communications to being more relevant for things like teams and Viva Engage and whatnot.
Siobhan: I'm not picking on you, everybody is still reliant on email. It's like a cockroach, it will survive the nuclear holocaust.
Martin: It's still going to be there forever.
Siobhan: How did you start when you first were brought on? You have this base level agreement with the senior leadership, and also the employees that things were broken, which is great. So where did you go from there? Did you hit the ground running?
Martin: Most definitely. During my interview, it was quite clear to me that there was a clear focus on wanting to improve engagement. The most important thing I needed to do was to bring the strategic leaders, particularly in the corporate services side of things, to the people who have impact over internal communication, but also who gain the most benefit out of its improvement, to create a steering group that could then facilitate the development of an internal communication strategy.
What happened as a result of that group and the freedom they gave me and another colleague was that we ran a very open discovery program for four months. So we ran a listening program that went way beyond the scope of what you would traditionally call internal communication. Going out and asking very open-ended questions such as what do you do in your job and what gets in your way, you begin to understand what's going on. And then you can design the internal communication services to work in the flow of those different aspects.
Building Trust Through Incremental Wins
Siobhan: We should probably back up a little bit because you are doing all of this completely remotely, correct?
Martin: I think that was one of the shots that really brought home to me.
I live in the far north of Scotland, five hours away from my office. Day one, I opened up my email and there were 150 emails from different people trying to accomplish different things. So whether it was trying to sell a pair of walking boots through to the chief executive trying to provide a briefing, you know, there was no strategic approach. Everything was competing against each other. And that was the hook that I was able to play back very quickly to say, you know, we need to really understand what's going on here and understand why email is being used as this cockroach of communication.
Siobhan: Did you uncover anything unexpected?
Martin: We found a whole bunch of things that were frankly nothing to do with internal communication, such as the office Wi-Fi was terrible. We were able to play those issues back in the customers’ voice, and these things started to get fixed.
As soon as you then see things getting fixed you start building trust. And once you start building trust with your colleagues and your senior management team, they then buy in to what you're trying to offer.
By the time we got to the end of the strategy, there was complete buy-in across the executive team because they realized that internal communication is not just about channels and messaging. It's about designing services that stitch all of these corporate services together.
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Advice for Internal Communications Pros
Siobhan: Any advice for internal comms practitioners who want to prove they're more than message pushers?
Martin: It's like layers on a cake. A lot of practitioners talk about messaging, they talk about channels, they talk about tactics. But at the top level, nobody gives a damn about those things. What they actually want to know is how are we going to achieve those outcomes?
If you're a private sector business, how is internal comms going to put more profit in the bank or save us more cost?
Or if you're working in the public sector, how does it deliver greater value for the organization? How does it make it more efficient? How does it generate this sense of belonging across the organization? You retain colleagues, people feel a bit more connected to your values.
I think that's what you need to do. My objectives — you could probably lift and shift them into any business — are things like alignment, governance, engagement and collaboration, but being clear about what those mean. For example, governance was around helping colleagues understand their own roles and responsibilities when it comes to communication internally and then helping them understand which channels are for them and which channels are for the business and how those different channels work and giving them permission to use those channels appropriately.
And wrapping around the whole thing was the employee experience. The phrase I would use is that this is business led, but user-centered. It's very clear that you are designing to strategic needs, but you're designing those services in a way that are usable.
Siobhan: And making the argument why them being usable is actually beneficial for the business.
Martin: Exactly.
These staff surveys people are shipping in, they're then determining the business need. Ultimately, a lot of the stuff that we're doing has come from colleagues, but the business is then playing those back to say, OK, this is what you've said, but this is what we need to achieve. How can we meet that in the middle? And the bit where you meet in the middle — the sandwiches you design — is to meet how people work.
An Interim Intranet to Start
Siobhan: So you go through this discovery process. And then you built out a very strong strategy. But I want to kind of jump ahead a little bit, but I want to know what did you end up delivering? What did you hand over to employees to wean them off of the email?
Martin: First we designed an interim intranet. There wasn't an intranet at all. The comms team and I quickly spun up an interim solution on SharePoint because while we were discovering, we also had to make things simpler for people to do.
So we spun up a very simple intranet and used that as a sort of test bed as a means of helping them get to the future. A good example of that would be taking the chief executive out of email into a blog online and then starting to use the online tools to help facilitate conversation.
Ultimately, we ended up rolling out Viva Engage. We've repositioned Teams to go back to being a workbench, which is what it's designed to do — meeting colleagues, teams chatting about how do I get this done, what decision do we need to make in between those sort of meetings? It's not designed as a social channel and at that time it was the only place where people can hang out, as it were.
But Teams is hidden in that context, you can't actually see what's going on. Whereas Viva Engage very much is a collaborative tool, an employee networking tool that facilitates cross-silo working and also some of the things that we've rolled out, leadership corner and campaigns and storylines as a leadership tool to help facilitate.
Underpinning that is a new intranet, which we're calling an omnichannel intranet. It's the center of attention, but it allows the other channels to work seamlessly around it.
How We Decided on Viva Engage
Siobhan: You said that people were working on Teams and you rolled out Viva Engage. Was part of this just the fact that you were a Microsoft shop? Or when you were going through discovery, did you decide that that was the best tool for the job?
Martin: We did decide in the end that was the best choice for the job, but we had quite an extensive technical options appraisal. We developed the strategy into draft mode. Then, to help us understand the cost implications of rolling out the strategy before we took it out for a business case to our executive team, we did the sensible thing of going out looking at the market.
I've done quite a lot of this in my previous roles. So in terms of understanding that we wanted to use an out-of-the-box layer, for example, or a SaaS product rather than a product that would fit in our SharePoint tenancy for our intranet. We went out to look at things in the ClearBox Consulting report and got some sort of benchmarks out of conversations that I had following that.
We then looked at the various options for ESNs [enterprise social networks] and how those various ESN packages could plug in to our Microsoft environment. But once you're in the ESN market, knowing that Workplace by Facebook was sunsetting at that time, the choice of Viva Engage was they're having a very clear understanding around what you wanted to use it for. Is it a leadership tool or is it a community engagement tool? That very quickly gets you into the conversation.
We knew we'd need a licensed product eventually because of the options that come out with the various licensed products that made that leadership piece an awful lot easier.
Siobhan: I imagine that some of the default integrations with the rest of your platform was a selling point as well.
Martin: Very much so. We were already on a SharePoint intranet. It meant when we rolled out Viva Engage, it was a very simple way of getting that started — to demonstrate the integration, literally to pop the relevant web part straight on the home page alongside your news. Before you know it, people were getting to the level of all this is quite seamless and this works with Teams too.
Before you know it, the change piece in terms of the technology comes quite easily.
A Two-Phased Rollout
Siobhan: You're building these habits. It's sort of a stealth version of change management, if I can say. Don't tell anybody you're doing change management.
Martin: We're changing people through stealth rather than them actually realizing they've gone through a change management process.
Siobhan: How long has it been since Viva Engage launched? Because I know that you've actually had some demonstrable results, which I'd love to talk about.
Martin: We rolled it out in two phases. I'll be honest, we were planning to rollout the whole shebang in August last year.
We quickly realized that our executive team were going at a particular pace, and we had colleagues going at another pace and other colleagues going at a much slower pace. We needed to facilitate what I call learning in the crowd. The best way of doing that is to begin with one thing and find out what those communities of practice are that people can join.
So we ended up doing a phased launch: in August, we rolled out communities of practice, the free version. And then in October, we launched the other aspects, once enough of our senior leadership team were comfortable. Some of them were at the vanguard from the start, but others were going at a slower pace.
Once we had enough of a coalition of the willing involved and got them trained up, we then launched the second phase of Viva Engage.
We were very clear around which aspects of Viva Engage we wanted people to use and which bits — even though they could use them — we shied them away from. So for example, Storylines, we made a real play to say, this is the leadership channel. Although anybody can use it, anyone's a leader in terms of your subject matter, what we want to be able to do is to say, this is the Leadership channel.
Once you get into the paid version, you get hidden superpowers with Storylines. You can give your leaders an audience. In our case, we gave them an all staff audience. Then the technology can start doing some of its magic behind the scenes without you having to do a great deal of lift and shift. That's why for me, Viva Engage is a good fit for us. It is a very simple tool for our leadership to use.
Rolling With the Setbacks
Siobhan: Was having to pivot your plan where you thought you were going to be rolling out in August and then having to change — is that mildly nerve-wracking by chance?
Martin: Very mildly nerve-racking. I've used that phrase, learning in the crowd. And I have no idea where that came from, but it just came to me on a spur of the moment. I think I was out on a bike. And it's OK. We can turn what behind the scenes might seem a really stressful and turn that into something that's really positive.
I'm really glad that we did that because it gave people who wanted to take a bit more time and wanted to learn how the tool works, the time and the space to do that. For example, leaders were sharing pictures of their dogs on our pet's corner — that's one of the social communities that we rolled out. And immediately they then started to get the hang of that. And before you know it, all of a sudden these business topics in certain communities started to spring up.
That's where the magic happens.
Siobhan: It's funny how the pets always act like the gateway drug.
Results Post-Viva Engage Rollout
Siobhan: So I mentioned that you've had really good results since the launch. Can you talk a little bit about those wins? And if you would do anything different, I would love to hear about that too.
Martin: One of the results is that some of the analytics show that we're in the top 25% of companies onboarding, in terms of who are interacting with Viva Engage since we've launched. It's a bit of a disposable figure, but it gives you a bit of comfort that you are doing the right thing. So that's been really good.
But the most important aspect for me is the fact that we're getting up to 90% engagement with our leadership comms, especially particularly with the CEO. And I think that's primarily because we were very clear about using Storylines and we knew how Storylines would work with the activity bell notifications in Teams and the fact that we could assign leaders the all staff groupings.
Also, we use Leadership Corner because it's an aggregation tool. So it's absolutely amazing that you can just drop Leadership Corner on the home page of your intranet and all of a sudden anything that any of the leaders are doing is immediately visible to anyone. So they've gone from having water cooler chats with people coming out to meetings when they're in offices to having those same water cooler chats digitally and also communicating in their own right as people.
For me, that's been the biggest win. So the colleagues are seeing the demonstration of that leadership in public, whereas previously they weren't seeing it.
A Look at Next Stages for the Digital Employee Experience
Siobhan: Where are you in terms of the plans, because I know that this is an iterative rollout and that you have the interim intranets and now you've got Viva Engage. What's the future now for your rollout?
Martin: We're doing an intranet in two phases. First phase is a minimum viable product. And what that does, it gets us to a point where we can then build in terms of the longer term.
Particularly, I've mentioned that task management behind the scenes. Most organizations will have a different HR system and a maybe a different records management system, whether that's SharePoint or something else, or ways of logging in to do your Flexi or room bookings, or booking a holiday, getting your expenses, all those sort of applications behind the scenes which traditionally you've had to learn how to do.
As a new member of staff, when you start and you've got seven or eight different applications to learn, lots of videos to watch and guides to do. Ultimately what we want to be able to do is to say: what are the key things, what are the tasks that you do as a member of staff? And you could just do those with one click from the intranet. That's ultimately where we're going, our digital experience platform, which is essentially the MVP plus. It's been a significant change to the management process.
The other thing here is when you're designing services, you're moving away from just servicing links to a policy, to actually helping the HR team understand that people need to answer questions out of that document. So the question becomes how can you help people present that information in a way on a page, an FAQ, whatever it might be, that there's more self service. That's where that efficiency eventually will come from. We're not dropping requests to the help desk anymore, we're getting that self-service. And who knows in the future that some of that self service may be AI generated.
A Switch to a Service Provider Mindset
Siobhan: I imagine that a big incentive, aside from from helping the existing employees, is knowing that this new group of employees will be coming in and joining the organization.
Martin: Exactly. One of the key things that we've done, we're moving away from a functional architecture for our resources. So we're moving away from people having to know that the HR policies are in HR or the governance policies are there or the comms team do this or the IT team does that. So we're moving towards a category and topic type structure.
So you're thinking, how do I engage with colleagues? Well, that concept is in there. How do I support myself and colleagues? That's where most of the HR stuff is going to be. How do I govern and manage?
So you're thinking from a category perspective and you're then taking those service providers on a service journey to think you're trying to help colleagues answer a question, not necessarily just send them a policy.
Siobhan: I love that you're taking that approach as opposed to departmental because every organization runs differently. Different things live in different departments depending on the organization.
Martin: There's also one of the benefits around moving away from these silos of needing to know who to go to, because we are going to be bringing in different people with a different perspective.
People have been here for 20 years with one perspective. If you move from another department, you don't need to know where to go when you arrive. You just ask and you just need to know how do I do something. What it means is you level the playing field of all colleagues, irrespective of how long you've worked here.
So all of a sudden you're designing for an inclusive experience as opposed to designing for an exclusive one for people who already know what to do and where to go. I think that's been really, really key to our thinking. We're thinking long-term, when we get a lot of people join us from day one, what's their experience going to be? Well, it's going to be the same as everyone else working here.
Cultural Impact, Dogs and Cats Style
Siobhan: What sort of impact you've seen in terms of these changes that you've been introducing on the culture of Scottish Funding Council. Have you have you seen any kind of demonstrable difference?
Martin: We were always a very collegiate organization, a water cooler organization, even though we're doing very serious work for very serious people, big societal issues. As a collective of people, we are really quite fun. It's amazing that scientists and data analysts and engineers and you know policy advisors you'd think that may they might be quite boring, but we're anything but.
We are a very social organization in that respect. And yet we were trapped in this formal way of working and formal way of communicating. And I quickly realized that, alongside the channels we also needed to change the style and tone of our communication. So talking about you and I and we and us as opposed to talking at us in the third person around the Scottish Funding Council is saying this, you know, you don't talk to each other like that at the water cooler.
I've seen a huge difference now in the communications that people are sharing themselves. We've identified during discovery that we were basically cats and dogs. Dogs are the people that want to share. They've got a lot to say and they don't really care how they say it.
And then we've got cats who very much want to listen and engage in that way, but are less likely to automatically start posting or sharing. That takes time to do that.
So we realized we had enough dogs in the organization to ensure that something like Viva Engage would work. And that's exactly what's happened. We've still got pockets of people and we're trying to understand why that is. But people just have different impressions and different behaviors and that's fine.
Siobhan: I do want to give you a chance just to sort of, you know, any points that you wanted to raise that we haven't covered. I also want to give you an opportunity to shout out your colleague, who I know you worked with closely on this.
Martin: Yes, my colleague, Rebecca Rice, without her expertise — she's a social marketer by trade and she's come in to be a data analyst here and then consequently has gone on to lead the digital media side of work here. She and I have been working very close together and we became besties quite quickly after I joined.
She sort of flocked to me because she saw there's somebody a bit like me here. Without Rebecca's expertise, helping to articulate and do that market research in a way that we've been allowed to do. I think that's really key that the leadership of the organization has allowed us to do this, they've trusted us to go out and do this and hopefully we're getting the results.
Rebecca has been absolutely central to making this all happen.
Siobhan: Well, Martin, thank you so much for joining me and sharing a little bit of your journey. I know that we're only midway, so we might have to check in again in a year or so, see how that digital employee experience platform rollout goes. But appreciate it again, and congratulations again for your win.
Martin: Thank very much and yeah, thanks once again for the people who nominated me. I appreciate it.
