S
See It
Attention
Does it win attention in a busy, distracted environment?
A short read on what the project is for, how it works, what is underway, what we are seeing so far and what happens next. The full interim report sits behind the button at the end.
Australia Post moves parcels and mail through one of the largest operational networks in the country: processing facilities, delivery rounds, retail stores and support offices. Keeping that many people safe depends on communication, and a large volume of safety material moves through the network every week, across many channels and in many formats.
Almost all of that effort is measured by a single number: whether a message was read. A read message is not the same as a changed behaviour, and between the two sits everything that matters, whether the message was noticed, understood, felt as relevant, easy to find, practical to act on and backed up on the floor.
Project Signal exists to close that gap. It looks at how safety messages travel through the network today, tests where they cut through and where they fall away, and builds the capability inside Australia Post to design communication that arrives, lands and shows up in what people do.
Read rate tells us a message arrived, never that it worked. Closing that gap is the point of Project Signal.
SIGNAL is the framework at the centre of the project. It treats a safety message not as a document to send but as a journey to complete: six stages a message must earn on its way from sent to acted on. A message can be well written and still fail because it was never noticed, or noticed and still fail because no one could see why it mattered to them.
The same six letters run through everything in the project. The desktop review scores today's communications against them, the pulse survey asks people to rate their own experience against them, and the workshops teach people to design with them. That gives Australia Post one shared, plain-language test for what good communication looks like.
Does it win attention in a busy, distracted environment?
Is it understood quickly and correctly, first time?
Does the reader see why it matters to them, their role and their day?
Can they find what matters and know where to look?
Is the required action obvious, specific and doable?
Is it reinforced over time until it becomes habit?
Four streams of work are underway, and they feed each other: the evidence from the review, the interviews and the survey shapes what the workshops teach and what the pilot builds.
Twenty real Australia Post safety communications assessed against SIGNAL, across the full channel ecosystem, to see what already cuts through and what does not.
Conversations with leaders across operations, safety and support about how safety communication really lands. All input is de-identified.
A short survey scoring today's communication against SIGNAL. Nine responses so far, an early sample alongside the interviews.
Three hands-on workshops that teach the SIGNAL approach through games, live activities and real Australia Post examples, with participants' phones paired to the screen.
These are early signals from ten stakeholder interviews and nine survey responses, aggregated and de-identified. They are directions to test, not conclusions, and the full report holds the detail behind every line here.
One-size national messages reach people they do not apply to. What lands depends on the site, the role and the way people actually work.
High message volume and several programs running at once, particularly heading into peak, may be contributing to disengagement.
It is spread across many channels and buried in wider updates, with no single place to find the current version of a message.
Many workers have no company email, so messages travel through leaders who print, post and brief them, and how well that lands varies with the leader.
Teams lean on read rates and lag indicators. No one can yet say with confidence that a given message changed behaviour.
Personal incident stories, sustained single-theme campaigns and engaging delivery already cut through, and there is real appetite for more interactive and video-led approaches.
Nine responses so far, from safety representatives and corporate or support roles. It is a small early sample, but the numbers point the same way as the interviews.
The strongest scores sit with noticing messages and seeing how they relate to the job, both at 3.8. The weakest sit with finding safety information, at 2.2, and having the time and support to act. Against the six principles, Navigate It scores softest at 2.7, which matches what the interviews describe.
The program now moves from evidence to capability. Three workshops teach the SIGNAL approach to the people who create and deliver safety communication, and the pilot applies it to real materials as the series runs.
The first communication materials are being developed and tested alongside the workshop series.
The complete desktop review, all findings and survey detail, the workshop architecture and the schedule, right here on this page.