Boosting collaboration by 40% in six months with Momentum Energy

New Way of Working

When Momentum Energy – the Melbourne-based energy retailer owned by Hydro Tasmania, Australia’s largest generator of renewable energy – decided to move to new premises, it unlocked a world of opportunity. Not only was it a chance to explore new ways of working, it provided the chance to co-locate other Melbourne-based staff who worked for Hydro Tasmania and for Hydro’s specialist consulting business, Entura.

The new office at 530 Collins Street is certainly impressive: it has been granted 5 Star Green Star accreditation and won gold in the 2020 Melbourne Design Awards. But the move was about more than just a new office: bringing together 405 people from multiple locations was an opportunity to increase collaboration and productivity within and across those businesses.

Project Fusion was established to realise a bold ambition of bringing the “better together” vision to life and to transform the way people work across the three businesses to adapt to change, be more productive, and attract the best people.

Co-designed with 25% of staff

Collaboration rates increased from 57% to 80%

40% increase in workplace enjoyment

Co-designed and co-owned

By embracing the program’s “for us, by us” principle, 100+ people representing a broad cross-section of the organisation were directly involved in designing their future ways of working.

New physical environments were prototyped to simulate future work scenarios and co-create opportunities for collaboration, micro interactions and team flow. This allowed people to step into their own designs and rapidly prototype different scenarios to test and learn.

Together, we shaped a comprehensive employee experience program for the reimagined work environment. This defined new ways of working across physical, people and virtual domains to enable better collaboration, greater mobility, and a stronger sense of belonging.

Taking a human-centred approach helped enable a sense of possibility, foundation of trust, and a drive to do things differently. This helped elevate and align the organisation around the employee experience, to do the hard work of implementing the desired change - overcoming the existing organisational barriers, operating constraints and structures.

Increased collaboration, flexibility and belonging

In the first six months, the three businesses have seen very positive results that demonstrate their vision and value for a new way of working.

It future-proofed their business. 420 people successfully transitioned to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic: The adoption of flexible and remote working across the entire workforce enabled the rapid transition of working away from the primary workplaces, made possible by the foundation of trust built through Fusion HCD process. ‍
Collaboration has helped bring three different organisations together for better results: Barriers to collaboration have been removed resulting in an increase of both formal and informal collaboration from 57% to 80%.
New employee experience function established: To build on the initial success and unlock more human potential, a dedicated team has been established to extend impact, HCD and leader-led capability to other initiatives across the entire group.
Uplift in employee engagement: Teams feel more empowered to step into bravery, solve problems and experiment. This is backed up by a measured positive shift in employee satisfaction, up by 11 basis points over one year.
Productivity gains across the enterprise are quickly adding up: Previously, meeting room setup time ranged from 7-15 mins which is now reduced to under 5 mins. Small time saving gains are quickly adding up to large productivity wins and reduced waste.