From chaos to clarity: How Capgemini is transforming Viva Engage into a strategic communications powerhouse
Capgemini
EMEA | Viva Engage Festival 2025
In this session we’ll get an inside look at how Capgemini, a global organisation with over 340,000 employees, reimagined its Viva Engage all-company community. What was once a space filled with unstructured, ad-hoc messages is now being transformed into a dynamic, Internal Communications-led channel for strategic information and employee engagement. Discover how this revitalised platform is now delivering real value to employees, fostering alignment, connection, and a stronger sense of community across the Group.
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Jeanette from Capgemini, who has a, I'm fortunate to have been sort of through the slides and through the talks with the speakers beforehand. Jeanette's got a great and very timely in respect of the discussion around information overload in the previous session, a great session on moving from chaos to clarity and get ready to have your mind blown by a particular data point that Jeanette will share during this session that speaks specifically to the risk of information overload. So Jeanette, now I have your slides integrated into the deck here, so I will share and you will speak.
I hope my colleagues have spotlighted you, yes, fantastic, so that everyone can see your face. And I'll go through, so if you give me a nod or feel free to give a wave of the hand when you want me to move the slide onwards and we'll go through your presentation. Great to have you here.
Thank you, Pete. Thank you for helping out the slides today here. And yes, I think the transition is really good here.
So quickly here, I'm Jeanette, I am the Head of Group Internal Communications at Capgemini. I've been with the group for two and a half years by now and in this role for a bit over a year. So maybe quickly, if we move on to the next slide, before we dive in, who is Capgemini? I think it's important to understand a bit who we are.
So maybe, yes, that slide is perfect. So we are an AI-powered global business and technology transformation partner and we imagine the future of organisations and make it real, as you can see on our slide, with AI technology and people. And I remember, Pete, when we talked the other day, I talked about our 350 000 employees.
We actually finalised an acquisition recently. We're up to 420 000 team members in more than 50 countries. So we are a big organisation and our teams deliver end-to-end services and solutions with their expertise in strategy, technology, design, engineering and business operations.
And yeah, let's move on to the next slide. I think that sharing information across an organisation of this size is certainly no small feat. And I think we can click, yes, I have those three channels here.
So internal communication obviously is important for any organisation, but I would say that some barriers come along with size and structural complexity. So as you can imagine, we have many offices, many departments, roles and languages also in place, so things can get complex quite fast. And a couple of years ago, the group internal communications team started to rethink the way we communicate with our people.
And at the time, we mainly used emails for everything we shared with our all-staff audience. And we also, of course, had an internet site where we posted articles, but that needed some TLC. And yeah, I would say as often that the reach was fairly limited.
And another challenge we had was what we talked about earlier, the information overload, I would say, or partly due to an fragmented approach to internal messaging. So we saw a need to transform the way we communicate to become more relevant and impactful. And also knowing how obviously innovation evolves at the speed of light and how technology can open doors to new habits, not only in our private life, but also at the office, we decided to start with the foundations and rebuild our channel mix.
And we built what we call the daily suite, as you can see here on the screen. It's our global internal communications ecosystem that gives everyone access to meaningful news and content communities and helpful tools and resources. And as its name indicates, we think of it as the place to go to every day, maybe as part of our morning routines when we go to work or to get the latest news and connect with peers and to be in the know.
And these channels all live together in one space, obviously all accessible via Teams environment. So it's really a solution where our people already are. So it's really about enhancing also the employee experience and creating a collaborative environment for everyone to thrive in.
And I think as an internal communicator, my goal is quite simple. It's to support our group business objectives, but also, and I think it's really important that channels also how we reach those people. So we really, really focus on the channels here.
And the focus today is going to be, of course, Viva Engage and in particular, our all company community. It's important to remember this because we do have a lot of communities and not all communities are used as channels for strategic internal communications. We can now move on to the next slide.
So when we started this journey, we had an unmanaged all company community. And as I mentioned, we are over 400,000 people. So I will let you guess what that looked like in terms of relevance, interest, and I would say like overall the quality of the post.
So we therefore made an executive decision and decided to start using the all company community as a strategic channel for employee communications. Now why was that? Well, firstly, we wanted to modernise the employee experience by using new and more engaging channels. And also that are a bit similar to the ones we use in our personal life.
I think as many companies, we have different generations across our employee audience. And of course, everyone have their own preferences when it comes to consuming information. So we have everyone from the baby boomers in the forties and sixties to until generation Z. So we thought that would serve as a compliment to email, but also articles and other more traditional channels.
And secondly, we also wanted to simplify the employee experience. And one of the things we discussed was about the ease of use. So it needs to be easy to access.
And this may sound like a kind of a small thing, but it's really crucial here because coming back to what we just saw in the SWOOP presentation, the reality is that people are busy. They don't want to lose time. So it was important to find a solution that really corresponded to that.
And also, we also know that the Viva Engage app worked really well. And also some other interesting features, such as you can organise events in communities. And that was something we wanted to try as well.
And something also I talk a lot about in conversations with people, I talk a lot about ease of use for employees. And that's normal. That's important.
It makes a lot of sense. But it's also a channel that is really simple to use for my team as admins of the community to share content quickly. I mean, it's obviously putting a post out there is much faster and easier than building an article or crafting and preparing and test sending and all staff mailers.
It's also a time saver for my team. And thirdly, we're of course looking for opportunities to better engage with our people. We were very email heavy at the time.
Email is quite top down. It works for some part, some communications, but maybe not all. So we looked into that.
We really wanted to support transparency and openness and also break down silos. Again, we're a really big group here. So that's really important for us.
And also, of course, collaboration. Viva Engage offers ways to communicate and collaborate in a whole new way. And it kind of brings us closer together and open also new doors to how we connect with peers from across the business.
And of course, an opportunity for people to make their voice heard. And obviously, interactive features is a great way for us to listen to what people have to say. And I would say from a corporate culture perspective, this is also a fantastic way to invite our people to be part of the conversation.
Using polls or questions, you can get really both useful feedback and overall sentiment in real time, which is something you don't necessarily receive by email. And of course, last point, we talked a little bit about it already. We also saw it as an opportunity to increase leadership visibility and presence and amplifying executive communications and encouraging a more visible and approachable leadership.
Now, what did we do? So we did a lot of things. It feels like I could probably have a whole workshop on that part, but I've nailed it down to I think there's six bullet points here. So I think to quote the famous motivational speaker, we started with the why by defining a clear purpose.
And yes, the purpose is to share business information with our people while offering ways to engage and encourage conversation. That's the why. And to do that, we put into place a governance structure.
And it was really interesting to hear also from the Schneider in the beginning, because we took another approach here. We really discussed who should be able to post, who own this community. And we decided to that the group internal communications own this community, because the idea obviously was to use it as this strategic channel to share information with our people.
So to make that happen, we made a decision to not let anyone post. Of course, everyone can react and comment, but the goal was not in this community to leave it open. So that was one of the discussions we had.
Because before that, this community had no governance. Obviously, it was basically a wall with everyone could say anything they had on their mind. Of course, we also now work with some of our CEO and our C-level executives.
I'm going to see a couple of examples of that later on. And we do keep this very strong governance. It's very limited.
And of course, content is all about the content. We developed an editorial calendar. You only get one chance to make a first impression, as we all know.
So we prepared content for, I think, three months. But of course, it was a mix of time-sensitive content, but also some evergreen content you can just add there if you have a hole. But of course, the calendar evolves almost every day with things going on.
And then coming back to the leadership buy-in. Of course, we already knew that our people want to hear from the leaders. So we onboarded some of the key leaders and got their buy-in.
We didn't want this to be the mutual admiration club for internal comms teams. And people go to where the leaders are. So this point was really crucial.
And then training and testing, of course. We identified our admins. We created our own internal test community.
We cleaned out the old content and, of course, built and executed on our plan. And we also partnered with some employee ambassadors pre-launch to make sure we have some teams ready to kind of help us drive the awareness and adoption of this channel. And of course, last but not least, measurements is really important.
We started measuring from day one so that we could make data-driven decisions. And actually, today, our most viewed posts in the community have a similar or even slightly higher reach than an all-staff emails. And that's a real milestone for us.
And of course, I mean, on top of that, we have the engagement aspect. We talk about reach and so on. But we also get a lot of engagement from our people that you don't get through email.
And data is obviously important also to kill some myths even, because a lot of people come to me and say, I don't want you to send this mail on a Friday because somebody reads the mail on a Friday. But when I look at the data for our all-company community, Friday is actually quite a good day for us, for our audience to post. So it's really important to kind of have those data-driven conversations.
And as I mentioned, the data points here, before we took on the governance model here, we actually had a lot of things going on in our community. We had an average of 35k posts per month. But when we took on the governance, we decided on having around 20 posts per month.
So it's almost one per business day. It depends. It's not like an exact number, but it's an average.
Sometimes you post once a day or three, four times per week. We try to keep that rhythm. It's been quite regular since, and it seems to work for us.
And also, I would say that I think this month, we had a reach of 74%, which is very high. I don't think we have that number before. So I think we're trending quite well.
I also actually have a couple of other examples, which is actually outside of our all-company community, but I thought it was interesting to mention those as well, even though I mainly talk about our all-company community here today. We did have another example here from one of our teams, innovation teams. We talked about how we can reduce information overload, and they had an email message that went out, a newsletter that went out on a regular basis, and they decided, I think it was maybe a year ago now, to move that to a dedicated community.
And they increased their reach from 12,000k to over 32k by just changing format for their audience. And we also have, as I mentioned, we have this all-company community, but we also have a lot of other communities, and a lot of them are actually all-country communities. And in one of these country communities who kind of work with FIBA Engage the same way we do, to push it, to use it as a strategic channel for comms, local comms in this case, for that specific country, they moved away from a quite small, a couple of hundred views than their previous solution, to an average of 16k viewers in terms of reach for posts published by the leaders.
So that's really, I think, quite some powerful numbers here that gives an idea of the opportunity and the potential of this channel. Now, how does it look today? I'm having a couple of slides here on what type of content we use. Here we have an example of our CEO, so highly strategic post, and you can move on maybe to a couple of more examples here.
We have one of our colleagues talking about how to build a sustainable mindset. We have some comments, sorry, some posts on events where we have attended. So I think one of the key importance here is to really have a varied content, keeping it also relevant for a very large audience.
So these are some corporate examples, but we also have other types of content, and I think particularly FIBA Engage works really well when it comes to, for us, sports sponsorships, because we are lucky to have a lot of activities around and support different sport events. We embrace the values of sports, so from an intercommunications perspective, we are also lucky to offer some interesting competitions where our people can win tickets to experience those events, and this is typically an area where I see FIBA Engage work really, really well. And here is very interesting, because we have really moved away from driving those competitions fully through emails to hosting them uniquely in the all-company community, and it's not only a quick and easy way to organise those employer competitions, but it's also a fantastic way to create engagement.
And I would also say that here what works best is simplicity. I think we, I remember one of the competitions we had this year, I think we had a couple of them. It was a competition to win tickets for the Women's Rugby World Cup in the UK.
We basically just asked, tag the person you'd like to attend the event with and tell us why. And of course we had a whole framework around that, but that kind of the, I would say, the framework here and just kind of launch the competition was quite easy, and of course that was made on purpose, because when you tag people you also get more engagement, people see the post, so we try to play with those features as much as we can. So, and there are some other events here as well that tend to work really well.
And yeah, another thing we tried, I mentioned it quickly in the beginning, it comes back to the importance of the integrated employee experience. It's about events. We don't organise a lot of all-staff events, because we have a very, very big audience, and of course there are a lot of events going on, on local levels and so on, but we did organise a great event back in September of last year in Barcelona.
It was also actually related to one of the sporting sports sponsorships I just mentioned. And that was really a great experience, even though we kind of crashed the site, I think, but I guess that is positive in this sense. We really saw not only good reach, but also the engagement, the conversation that the event started, using questions, people really started answering questions organically.
It was a very interesting experience to see how well that turned out. But we also organise events in other communities. One community is our VP community, where we organise events on a regular basis, and we have a smaller audience, so it's kind of easy to organise those, but it starts to work really well, and it's a really great experience of an integrated experience.
But also what works really well, and we talked about it previously, is about the leadership messages, and we are lucky to work with great leaders who are happy to share internal messages with our people, with or without the delegation feature, and our top reach posts are all from leaders, and I think that aligns well with what we also see on social media channels externally. People prefer to hear from people rather than generic aliases from brands, and we also encourage our executives to lead the conversation, and we can see from the data that this really works best. People want to listen to people, and I think also leaders can really build the kind of trust that no communications campaign can do, and I think Viva Engage can scale that visibility, and when our leaders talk, people engage.
I think also these posts perform because they sound human, and as we can see here, our people overall engage more and more, and I think also we get this immediate feedback on how messages are being received, and we can also respond if there's any concerns and questions, so I think this is really again coming back to the power of the platform, but also our journey has basically just started, but I put a couple of examples here on the screen, and I think what is really important here is when you see that the impact of those posts. We have examples when we have shared, for example, success stories from various parts of the business, and people started commenting and tagging people saying, oh, this is great, we can use this in our conversation with this prospect next week, or this client next week, and that's really, I think, where you see that internal communications really can bring business value, and I think that's something we try to work more with. Of course, it's always nice to see all types of engagement, but we're starting to see some really interesting conversations happening here, and one of the screenshots can even see your CEO commenting on something here, so I think that's really a good example of how we have started to work with this channel, and I'm going to try to just go to my last slide, I hope I'm not over time.
There's a lot of lessons learned here, and I'm just going to mention a couple of them, happy to follow up in the chat if needed, but I think it's quite easy. First lesson, be clear, it's all about the purpose, right? Before you do anything, just start mapping down what you want to achieve with this community, what does success look like, what's the value we're trying to bring here, and the metrics, what metrics are important, because we tend to focus a lot on the raw data, on the reach and engagement, but there are many other things that you want to start looking into as well. And secondly, be patient, change takes time, test and learn.
Internal communications is not an exact science, so it's really important to be a bit nerdy, looking to all the details and really understand what works and why, and it brings me to the last point, it's about being curious, try new things. There is no such thing as no one size fits all, and test and understand what works for your community, and I think since we re-launched the all-company community, we have also launched, as I mentioned, a series of other country-specific communities, for example, and in one of them, the uptake has been so good, so they literally stopped all-country emails, and that works for that community, maybe it's not the intention of the all-company community, but it's important to understand and measure, to see and take those data-driven decisions, and look at previous posts and learn from them, ask super-users why they go to the community, but also ask the people that don't go the same question. So I think that kind of sums up, I think I'm over time, sorry for that, and yeah.
You are good on time, don't worry, if I'm getting stressed about time, I will interject, but this is fantastic, I'm more than happy to give you all of the allocated time to share the lessons that you've learned. There's a lot of questions in the Q&A, so if you do have time, Jeanette, just to jump in there and give some comments. I would say as well to anyone on the call, if you're looking at the Q&A and you see a question and you've got a perspective on a potential comment on that question, feel free to share your two cents, you know, people are putting questions forward for the speakers, obviously, first and foremost, but we all bring experience to the table, and so don't be shy of commenting on any questions that you see, but Jeanette, a massive thank you for that.
One, I do want to just take one question that's really caught my eye, and I think it's always interesting to ask a bit of a challenge question, so sorry about this, but there's a question from Richard, which is, did you have any resistance from leaders to Viva Engage? I know a lot of people do need resistance from leaders. Did you have a reluctance for leaders to use it personally, and if so, how did you manage that? No, great question, and yes, yes, we had. I mean, we have a lot of leaders, and again, we have not onboarded all leaders, because we're a big company, so we focused on a couple of them.
Oh, there's a lot of things to say, so yes, first off, we had some resistance. I think the key there is not to focus too much on the channel, because they don't really care about the channel, they care about the impact, they care about the ROI, so I think one of the things to keep in mind is not just to talk about Viva Engage, or just trying to position it as a tool to make impact, business impact, and I think there's a couple of things here, and you can maybe, if there's a specific leader, I think the best way is to try to understand what's important for that leader. If there's a specific challenge you can maybe help solve with the channel, and play it that way, talk their language, and I think that's really something we do with most situations, to get our leaders on board, and again, I think also, I mean, leaders are very busy, but again, as I mentioned, this is actually a quicker tool than other tools, so I think it's important also to keep that in mind.
What is important though, and I think I mentioned it briefly, is that there is a delegation feature that is very powerful, so you can work with chief of staff, or an executive assistant, and basically delegating the rights to post for you, it takes, what, five seconds, two clicks, so you can actually do that, and people won't see that it's actually delegated, it's still written in the name of the leader, so that's kind of a way to work with that, but again, I think we have both leaders with whom we do work with the team, and others that do it organically, but I do think it's interesting, because we have our, of course, our CEO, and some other leaders as well, and it's a really good argument, because if a leader says I don't have time, you can always go back and say, well, you know, our CEO at times, I think that's kind of a powerful argument as well. Yeah, yeah, that's a really handy one to have, so Jeanette, your last slide says thank you to the audience, but I want to say a massive thank you to you, and I'm sure the audience are very grateful as well for the knowledge that you've shared today, so thank you so much.
Meet the speaker:
Jeanette Vikbacka-Castaing
Head of Group Internal Communications
