How Officeworks is using Mural for efficient and engaging collaboration across Its support offices

SITUATION

A national leader with team members across Australia

Established in 1994, Officeworks is one of Australia’s most loved brands, helping make bigger things happen for its team, customers, and communities. Officeworks stocks over 40,000 products across office and art supplies; education resources; stationery; office furniture; workplace supplies; and technology, inspiring Australians to work, learn, create, and connect. With a large national store footprint of 168 stores and a strong online presence, the Officeworks family consists of almost 10,000 team members across stores, customer fulfillment centers, and support offices across the country.

‍

CHALLENGE

Making the transition to hybrid work environments in 2020

When Melbourne went into lockdown in March 2020 and Officeworks’ support offices transitioned to hybrid working, they sought a solution to bridge the gap in their digital tooling suite.

“We were looking for a tool that would help to connect and engage our geographically dispersed teams, appeal to both technical and non-technical audiences, and provide more than just whiteboard capability,” says Natalie Phillips-Mason, Head of Change.

“It was also critical that the tool we chose readily integrated with our existing Microsoft suite. After a period of discovery and due diligence, we chose Mural and commenced an adoption process.”

‍

SOLUTION

A versatile, integrated platform that adapts to changing needs

Mural was selected for its versatility, its ready integration with project management tools including JIRA and Confluence and its flexible commercial model. 

One of the first teams to adopt Mural was the Change Management team. The Change team uses Mural to:

• Create engaging and visual messaging 
• Facilitate brainstorming and leadership workshops
• Create the Change@Officeworks Playbook 
• Transform change management self-service tools into templates that could be utilized across the business for projects large and small. 

The platform provided an innovative solution to other teams that were looking to better collaborate remotely.  

“Teams from across the business have started to adopt Mural to enable synchronous and asynchronous working” Natalie says. “This includes project teams who have adopted Mural for agile cadences; our Strategy Development and Delivery teams who facilitate sessions with large groups of remote contributors and operational teams who have adopted Mural as a tool to help manage daily tasks in a more interactive and fun way. Importantly, Mural is an inclusive digital tool to enable all of our Team Members to contribute through voice or digital interaction.”

The Change@Officeworks Playbook was designed as a reference for the business to be able to apply a consistent tailor-designed method for managing change. It describes the principles, framework, and templates to facilitate a change process regardless of project size.

“It started small, with sticky notes on a digital whiteboard, and quickly moved to building an enterprise wide Change Heatmap that was 12ft long when printed out,” explains Rowena Layzell, Change Partner at Officeworks. “Fast forward — we have used Mural to build a Change Playbook, and re-imagined our core change templates so that project teams and stakeholders can access and engage easily.”

‍

‍IMPACT

Building advocacy through hands-on training and 'show and tells'

To drive adoption, the Mural team facilitated tailored training for a subset of early adopters. Officeworks holds virtual ‘show and tell’ sessions — this allows Team Members from across different functions to showcase the way they are using the Mural platform. In this way, internal Mural champions play a role in continuing to support new users and enhance cross-functional capability.

By the numbers:

• With a targeted adoption approach, Officeworks has seen as increase in adoption of Mural from 31% to 66%
• Quarterly engaged members have increased by 867% since March 2021

“It’s been exciting to see the business more broadly find ways to use it,” Rowena says, “like running workshops, retros, tracking BAU team tasks and activities, and education masterclasses. Mural is one of those tools that is only limited by your imagination although there is inspiration in the template library if you need.”

‍

‍TAKE ACTION

Mural helps 95% of the Fortune 100 build better connection, collaborate better, and innovate faster

Meetings with Mural are more effective, more connected, and more fun. Get started today with a free account, and leverage our library of hundreds of templates to kickstart your next meeting.

Not sure where to start? Create the hybrid workspace of your dreams with the Hybrid Collaboration Worksheet.