4,000
Staff spread across 28 sites are now connected.
RSL LifeCare is a charitable organisation caring for over 7,500 residents in 28 retirement villages and 28 Aged Care Homes across NSW and the ACT. A leader in senior living, RSL LifeCare provides high-quality personal home care, retirement villages, and aged care homes (nursing homes) in Australia. Since 1911, RSL LifeCare has been serving the community by providing professional, caring support for veterans, and today, they welcome all members of the public.
Before beginning their digital transformation journey, RSL LifeCare had an outdated intranet implemented 10 years earlier. According to Ainslie Page, Digital Marketing Manager at RSL Lifecare, it was a ‘’legacy system that was clunky and not easy to use. There was a desperate need to overhaul the intranet and utilize a system that was a bit more innovative and user-friendly’’.
So RSL LifeCare turned to Powell, and our partner Synergy. Synergy was founded on the core belief that the right technology, when implemented correctly, can make your business better. Their team of skilled consultants, project managers, trainers, developers, provide the peace of mind needed to operate comfortably in today’s business environment.
The final push for RSL LifeCare to overhaul and modernize their intranet came from new government legislations. The Australian Royal Commission into Aged Care required care providers like RSL LifeCare to ensure easy access to policies.
‘’It was a great opportunity to implement a digital workplace that is easily usable, anywhere, anytime and that employees could really engage with as a central source of truth’’ says Ainslie.
Challenges
RSL LifeCare was using an intranet hosted on-premise which meant that employees had to be on the network to access it. This was not ideal for RSL LifeCare’s distributed workforce and deskless workers.
Murray Campbell, Consulting Manager at Synergy, explained that there was a need to move across to SharePoint Online which is ‘’accessible anywhere you’ve got an Internet connection, so It makes it easier for the workforce to be able to access documents’’.
According to Ainslie, the team at RSL LifeCare also needed to overcome another challenge:
‘’How can we join employees in one central place when we’ve got 28 different locations?’’
A medium to large organization, RSL LifeCare has over 4,000 staff spread across 28 sites and their Head Office in NSW and the ACT. While some employees work on-site, Home Care staff are highly mobile and spend their working hours both off-site with clients and at their fixed office address. Although corporate staff worked remotely during the pandemic, employees plan to return to the office. RSL LifeCare is the definition of a distributed workforce
”It’s a fountain of knowledge…a central source of truth”
Ainslie Page
Digital Marketing Manager
Objectives
Ensure easy access to policies & documents
Allow everyone to easily contribute content
Connect a distributed workforce
Communicate urgent information to everyone
When RSL LifeCare approached Synergy Australia, with their requirements for a user-friendly, cloud-based intranet Powell Intranet, was top of mind for Murray and his team. Built on Microsoft 365, Powell Intranet met RSL LifeCares primary needs for an accessible, secure content repository. However, what made Powell Intranet really stand out was how inclusive it is. Every employee can contribute to creating content and building RSL LifeCares ‘’virtual front door’’.
Implementation process
1. Evaluating proposals
After evaluating proposals from three vendors, RSL LifeCare worked with Synergy to design and implement Powell Intranet according to their needs.
2. Rewriting policies
Once the platform was built, the digital team had the tough task of rewriting policies that had become outdated and moving them over to the new intranet. There was a ‘’six- or nine-month delay between when the intranet was built and when they first started using it in the live environment and that was all to do with trying to get as many policies across as possible’’ according to Murray. This stage of the digital transformation journey was an initiative that needed to take place carefully with the right systems and processes in place.
3. Soft launch
Once the initial content was ready, RSL LifeCare began a soft launch of their intranet, ‘’Your Cooee’’, with one department. Four months later everyone had moved across to the new platform.
Results & impact
RSL LifeCare now has a sophisticated intranet along with ‘’better systems and processes in place to deal with maintaining files’’. They have achieved their need to offer easy access to documents and better searchability.
The intranet has become the first place users go when they log onto their computers in the morning to ‘’It is that central repository and fountain of knowledge’’, says Ainslie.
With the help of Synergy, RSL LifeCare has taken Powell Software’s ‘’intranet-in-a-box’’ solution and personalized it to their own branding. They used their signature deep blue and deep coral colours and two-tone imagery across the intranet. Powell Intranet, which they have named ‘’Your Cooee’’ now reflects RSL LifeCares brand image.
What started as a content management system has become a key internal communications tool. This is something that was very much appreciated during Australia’s numerous Covid lockdowns. The Intranet became the crisis communications tool to get news out to staff quickly.
Next steps
Once RSL LifeCare has gotten users up and running on the platform the next step is to really engage employees. As a Powell customer RSL LifeCare can continue to benefit from new features.
‘’[We have] better systems and processes in place to deal with maintaining files’’
Ainslie Page
Digital Marketing Manager
Conclusion
Ultimately, RSL LifeCare’s adoption of Powell Intranet, facilitated by Synergy, has successfully addressed the challenges of connecting a distributed workforce and ensuring easy access to critical information. “Your Cooee” has evolved beyond a content management system to become a central communication hub, fostering a greater sense of belonging and providing a vital link for all staff, regardless of location. This digital transformation has equipped RSL LifeCare with a modern, user-friendly platform to support its commitment to care and community, now and into the future.
