Cultural Change Communication: the Equilibrium Man Challenge

Workplace flexibility is a dry management issue. Yet in the context of people’s lives there are stories that resonate with all of us.

BRIEF

The Australian Government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) has a policy objective to mainstream flexible work practices. Men in management, typically the custodians of workplace cultural norms, were considered the smart place to start.

SOLUTION

The Equilibrium Man Challenge (EMC) was a micro-documentary series, shot in cinema verite style for distribution online, via a campaign site know as the Equilibrium Challenge. The challenge relied on sharing by members of well-qualified channels with ongoing traditional and social media activity and stakeholder outreach, including a ‘cheer squad’

The EMC was developed in response to a brief from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) to develop a campaign that would engage men in flexible work practices, thereby helping mainstream new workplace norms. The lack of men working flexibly had been identified as a key inhibitor to workplace gender equality.

Central to our proposal was to create a project of much greater scale than the agency’s budget could achieve otherwise, a project that would engage leading businesses in the campaign, not only to fund the project but, more importantly, to lend their credentials and help create a more authentic, real-world project that our target audience could relate to, which was defined as:

•       30 – 40 y/o white collar males and their partners

•       HR professionals in white-collar companies

 After months of concept development, discussion with potential partners, and a tightening of scope, the EMC was launched in April 2015, with the release of the first tranche of micro-documentaries. The launch was endorsed by senior executives of Mirvac and Telstra—our investor and participant partners—along with Corrs Chambers Westgarth, who participated in the Challenge, and with the strong endorsement of the Diversity Council of Australia. A second tranche of episodes was released in June and the final tranche in December.

Additional content supported the documentaries, including vox pop commentary and interviews with experts and thematic material was scaled up in the second half of the project to escape the limitations in the character-based story arcs of the documentary content and add new insights.

In terms of awareness raising, the project went from zero to reach an estimated audience of over two million. All media coverage was extremely favourable and realised a media editorial value of more than $1.2 million. We also had content shared extensively across stakeholder networks and used as reference and training material by many HR executives, consultants and industry associations.

Ultimately the project proved the value of a new collaborative campaigning model and using real life stories to promote and sustain policy objectives over a long period.