NEAL delivers reliability, efficiency, and more value for Aboriginal communities with Microsoft 365

Development by the people of North East Arnhem Land, for the people of North East Arnhem Land

In a time of remote work, it doesn’t get much more remote than North East Arnhem Land. Located in the utmost northeastern corner of Australia, the starkly beautiful, coastal, and isolated North East Arnhem Land is home to a largely Aboriginal population scattered across several indigenous homelands, in addition to the North East Arnhem Land (NEAL) Aboriginal Corporation—an organization as unique as the landscape and people it serves.

An Aboriginal-owned, nonprofit corporation, NEAL provides and develops opportunities for its indigenous community members. Started in 1968, NEAL works to improve the lives of the indigenous people of the region through independently managed regional development initiatives. It puts people to work providing environmental rehabilitation, arboreal, and horticultural services—as guided by Aboriginal knowledge systems—and offers civil works, fencing, building maintenance, and other services. Additionally, NEAL develops its people by providing valuable workplace skills and training programs, and it connects its people to work opportunities through its labor hire program.

Most impressive, though, and most challenging, is that NEAL is completely self-sustaining—instead of receiving funding, it puts people to work. The organization does this important and diversified community development and engagement work on its own terms, and it looks for every edge it can find to stay efficient, competitive, and responsive to community needs. That’s why NEAL decided to modernize its workplace and processes by adopting Microsoft 365.

Remote work, business disruption, and outdated practices

In fact, NEAL’s commitment to its community and to continuous improvement led it to rethink its entire IT strategy. Based in Nhulunbuy—which is on mainland Australia, but is quite isolated in terms of infrastructure—connectivity and reliability are significant issues. Add to that the ever-present possibility of gusting cyclones, and the threat of business disruption is very real.

“With our server on-premises, we kept getting power interruptions, sometimes from severe weather, which meant lost connectivity, lost access, and increased downtime,” says Ilizebel Venter, Accounts Supervisor at North East Arnhem Land Aboriginal Corporation. ”And getting a technician onsite at such a remote location was never easy.”

In addition to the limitations of an older technology stack, NEAL was struggling with increasingly outdated and inefficient work practices. It had to run a patchwork of localized, paper-dependent, and siloed work processes to manage its two locations in Nhulunbuy and Darwin—and its distributed field-based teams. NEAL field workers often found it difficult to access the work forms and HR-related content they needed on the job.

“The workers in the field might not be professional computer users, but they still needed to connect with every aspect of the business, whether it’s an induction on a computer, submitting forms, viewing payslips, or completing employment tasks,” says Venter.

NEAL also found it difficult to manage hybrid and remote work, which was an increasing pain point for both interoffice connectivity and talent retention. To service such a large territory, NEAL’s people need to travel, and the distance between offices in Nhulunbuy and Darwin is an 11-hour drive. The organization also must work with partners, customers, and some employees all over Australia. As such, it experienced complete downtime anytime anyone needed to travel for work. Moreover, although NEAL hires locally, the organization still needed its people to be able to work from less isolated places and avoid losing their brightest talent if life happened to take them elsewhere.

One solution, multiple capabilities

Working with IT partner Calibre One, NEAL moved to Microsoft 365 and adopted a digital phone system based on Microsoft Teams. It also adopted Microsoft 365 applications such as SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, OneDrive, and other collaboration and productivity applications to build a modern, durable, and reliable cloud-based work environment. With Microsoft 365, NEAL has become much more flexible and finds it easier to manage people who are working from multiple locations, often across vast distances. It has also gained the ability to let people work from home or on the go without missing a beat.

“NEAL gained more than just productivity tools,” observes Darren Gore, Chief Executive Officer at Calibre One. “It used Microsoft 365 to build an ecosystem—a range of solutions and capabilities, including ease of deployment, security, collaboration, integration, and the scale that comes with software as a service.”

Greater collaboration across greater distances

Microsoft 365 has been a game-changer for NEAL. In addition to unlocking a reliable solution for mobile and remote work, the productivity tools are helping the nonprofit find new opportunities for collaboration, communication, and improved workflows. People across the organization are working, sharing files, and co-producing seamlessly in SharePoint. Indeed, through the improved flow functionality, NEAL is solidifying its processes with timely notifications on work product handoffs, including documents for review and payments for approval. The organization expanded past localized working and the lost files and version control issues it created. NEAL has also seen a tremendous boost in productivity because work is no longer stalled by waiting for people to be onsite to physically ship and move files.

“In our staffing services alone, we’ve gone from a multi-day process of paperwork, shipping, sign-off, and data entry to a 10-minute process where information and workflows are created in SharePoint for direct process completion,” says Venter.

NEAL field workers have Teams on their smartphones and other mobile devices, and they now contact administrative teams directly from the field to upload and share images or find support. Meanwhile, NEAL office employees stay connected with the presence indicators and video calling in Teams. Knowing whether a fellow employee is free and able to jump on a face-to-face call helps NEAL close the vast distances of its territory.

“I’m working in Brisbane, but I’m not alone,” says Venter. “I can instantly have coffee with one of the girls in the office. Teams is vital for professional meetings and scheduling tasks, but also for those casual, meaningful conversations where we can say, ‘Hey! how are you?’”

Serving its community better

Aside from these leaps in connectivity, productivity, and resiliency to disruption, NEAL is better able to connect with and serve its own indigenous communities. It can now host board meetings more easily and accessibly by aggregating and sharing meeting information in one centralized hub.

“Board members come from the indigenous homelands to the Nhulunbuy office, and we use SharePoint as the platform on which we host meeting content and take minutes,” says Venter. “All of that collaboration and documentation happens right in the same system, and it’s immediately updated and accessible to all.”

Ultimately, NEAL’s ability to work more efficiently makes it more competitive, which allows the organization to deliver on its mission of serving its community within a business context. “To be competitive and really deliver for our community, we need to be at the front of the pack, and Microsoft 365 is helping us achieve that,” adds Venter.

Find out more about NEAL on Facebook and LinkedIn.