Q&A Panel (All EMEA speakers)
SWOOP Analytics
EMEA | Viva Engage Festival 2025
Q&A session with all EMEA speakers.
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I will now ask Shailesh and Jeanette to be, well, my colleagues, to find them and spotlight them because we have some more questions now, so hopefully Shailesh is also on the call. Still there you are, your beautiful face. Great to have the three of you on screen now.
So we've got about 20 minutes just for a few questions that have come through. So obviously there's in the Q&A, there was lots of questions specific to your individual presentations. I've kind of had a look through that and picked out some key themes that came through and we had a pre-event survey and there's some key themes that came in there and I've married the two together to sort of come up with key questions.
Some of these, you each touched on bits of this, but I'm interested to get your perspectives in the round. And the first question I want to ask is around purpose. Each of you mentioned purpose, whether it's the purpose of the community, the purpose of your network.
There's a lot of questions that speak to like, okay, how do you do purpose? How do you define the purpose of a community or your network? And then how do you actually embed that purpose? How do you bring that purpose to life on Viva Engage? Louise, you're off the hook because you've just been presenting. So take a minute for a breath, but I might throw actually to Jeanette, just in terms of purpose, any advice you've got for people on how do you define the purpose and then how do you bring that purpose to life in your Viva Engage community? Yeah, that's a great question and a tricky one. Maybe start actually with how you bring it to life.
I think it's what we did for sure is that we tried to be very clear within on the page, what the purpose is, why people should go there. So it was very clear, you couldn't miss it. But also when you started to see persons maybe not understanding the purpose, I think there's no harm in kind of nudging and commenting kindly back and say, well, great question or something else and try to maybe if that was not a question intended for that community, just try to find or explain the why.
There's a whole, I would say, educational piece. I think that's really important and it's about conversation, right? So I think it's really important also to answer and if you kind of go out the intended purpose. And we have done that a couple of times and there's never been any issues with that.
I think people are more, they appreciate actually having that feedback instead of just having an unanswered question or an unanswered comment. Because I mean, again, even though for us who took this approach of really working with, we've engaged all company as a strategic channel. I mean, we do want engagement, even though we don't open it up for everyone to engage.
So I think there's actually no harm in just kind of pushing, picking back or explaining or even sometimes commenting on one-to-one if needed to explain a little bit more on if it's not living up to purpose. Because if you don't do that from day one, I mean, your whole thing is going to be a bit blurry lines. So I think that's something at least we have done, especially in the beginning, and then people start understanding and it became less of a problem.
Yeah, yeah, makes total sense. And it's that ongoing conversation and consistent reinforcement, right? And Louise, I mean, you gave a great example there of a shift of purpose where, you know, it went from being managed by the change team to then managed by the properties team and the members of that community felt the change in purpose. Was it, I guess, same question, but I think specific to that example, was it relatively easy to sort of bring back the old purpose when you took back kind of control of that community? It actually was.
It was actually, it actually was and it didn't take a lot of time because what they had actually just been missing, our colleagues, was actually just answers and a dialogue, which was what we initiated in the beginning and which was, that was what was disappearing during the transition. So it actually didn't take a lot of time for them to get back on board. And the positive sentiment, like the positive tone also came back.
And it actually, it changed really fast as soon as they got replies. Yeah. So obviously that's like the tactical experiential side of living the purpose of the community, was this is a place where you come to get answers and to get response and feel heard.
Exactly. Living the purpose. Yeah.
Shailesh, is purpose something that Schneider Electric, you sort of put front and centre when creating and bringing communities to life? Absolutely. It's the central part of the WeWareEngaged strategy that we hold. And, you know, I agree to the point which talks about reinforcement of the purpose whenever the community is kind in a situation where they are not sure of how the conversation and what kind of conversations we should have.
And to cater to that, I think the channel owner, we always have channel, not a channel, a community owner or a manager, especially for the official ones, which makes it a lot easier for the official ones. We have our community managers and within the community, we also have community experts who we, you know, continuously keep in touch to answer all the relevant questions, to direct them to relevant resources or for any other community if it is not relevant for this one. So, that keeps on happening every now and then.
But I think the name of the community also has to be very clear what it represents. So, if it is a community which is not giving you the exact idea of what you can expect from the community, I think that's also important to have the correct name, naming of convention of the community along with the description which you put across within the community so that when people comes in for the first time in the beginning, they might be a bit puzzled, but knowing the description very well, understanding the people who are the community experts and going through a couple of links which you also provide on the community homepage, right? So, going through the links, they get to know in detail about what this community is all about. And of course, then scrolling through the old post, they can get a sense of what the conversation is going to be all about.
Of course, they're free to put in any kind of communication and they will be directed back to the right community or the right member. Yeah. And I think often people can feel like purpose is a bit more complex than it actually is.
Like you've just sort of said, you know, you just give people clarity and it's the clarity of purpose. And then reinforcing that purpose. If it starts to skew off, if topics that are unrelated to the core purpose of that community starts bringing up, you just have a conversation there, clarify it.
You do that, like you said, have that conversation out in the open in the community so others can see it. And then that becomes a kind of sense checking mechanism in itself, doesn't it? Yeah. And maybe just to compliment, a lot of people, I think this is something we all know as internal communicators, a lot of people come to me with a tactic.
I want this email or I want this, I want to open a community without thinking about what I'm trying to achieve. So, I think that's also coming back to the purpose. If you think about opening a community, great, but then go back.
It's like, why? Coming back to the why. It's like, what am I trying to achieve? Is there a specific problem I'm trying to achieve? And the purpose should build around that. And maybe the answer is not a community, it's maybe something else.
So, I mean, even though we have a lot of communities, a community is not always the right solution. It comes back to the kind of business problem you're trying to solve, I think. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. Shailesh touched on this next question I've got a little, talking about community managers. And I'm interested to hear from you all, any specific community management practices that have made a difference to how Viva Engage functions? Do you have kind of a formal thing around community managers across the organisation to help them get the best from their Viva Engage communities? Jeanette, sorry, because you're nodding frantically.
I'm drawn to you to start with you on this one. Please stop it. We did a lot of work on this one.
I'll keep it short. When we started this journey, we, of course, had a lot of communities. So, we did a big cleanup, actually, of inactive communities to start with.
So, it kind of start clean. We then also developed internal training, not only how to use, because it's quite straightforward, right? If you know how to post on LinkedIn, you know how to post on Viva Engage, not that different, right? And if you don't know, it's very self-explanatory, I would say. However, we also, we did develop internal training on what we expect and best practices.
We have, actually, a little e-learning that we developed internally. Now, what we also did, and I think this is important, especially for larger organisation, I think I saw a comment on that in the feed as well. We have also categorised the community into three different categories.
So, what we define as an official community is a community that is owned by the internal communications team, whether that's local or global, and then you get the little label, verified community. And we also have, of course, a naming convention related to that, even colour codes when it comes to the banners and things like that. So, we try to be very strict on that.
And then we have two other categories, what we call the recognised community, which is still managed by an expert in some domain, but not the comms team. And then we have what we call the interest communities. And I would say the expectations are different, because if you manage a community where you just want people to chat, it's a bit more, maybe less work for the admin, while if you're in a very highly moderated and governed community, that's a bit different.
Yeah, fascinating the structure that you put in place there. But like they say, structure can often breed safety, right? So, if you're getting that clarity of purpose, you're helping people then manage to deliver on that clarity of purpose. It's obviously creating a clearer, safer space for people to feel comfortable having conversations.
Shailesh, do you want to share a little more about what you do at Schneider Electric with community managers to support them? Very similar, very similar. It's a big governance point, an item to discuss with all the community managers where we set the expectations straight with them, that this is something what is expected. And they also, like any other scope and any other channel, need to have work towards improving the engagement, of course, so that they can continuously make regular posts based on how the community behave and, you know, how they respond to your posts and things like that.
But what I would also like to mention over here is that how it comes in very handy in a kind of crisis communication situations, like we have all seen in the past. So, in those kind of scenarios, these hub and spoke kind of model working closely with community managers really help moderate the conversations happening within the community, which can go from, you know, which can go out of control as well at times, which we have seen not too many, not too many, to be very honest, but on different topics, we have seen a need where we need to reach out to the community managers flagging the particular posts or individual who, and then the community manager takes it from there. So, it's part of the overall governance model that we follow and the community managers are very clear on the expectations, on the way that they need to conduct the posts and do things within Viva Engage or, you know, any other particular channel.
So, it's something which is very integral to that. Yeah, interesting, really interesting point around the crisis piece is, yeah, your community managers are linchpins of the community or they should be. Yeah, absolutely.
Louise, with Danske Bank, is there like, you know, when you were put on this change project, did you go through an experience of being enabled as a community manager or was this something that you took the lead on? And then what's the setup around community management? Oh, it's on mute. You've got the fun of Teams. Sorry.
So, we don't have a structured approach as Jeanette definitely does, but it was definitely something that we drove. I mean, the two colleagues that I was working on the project with were also from group internal comms. So, of course, we had some insights in terms of the community management because it is group internal comms who are owning the larger channels, the ones that Jeanette would probably call the verified channels with the checkmark.
But we also do have a lot of interest communities, right? So, what we did was it was actually something that we drove and we were fully enabled to do what we found best. But we haven't actually seen, as far as I recall, I don't think we've seen a similar project of that scale where a new community manager had to come in because then it would have always been someone from group internal comms. So, I don't think we have the same.
We definitely offer trainings, but I don't think we have the same structure as some of the others do at this point in time, at least. Yeah, interesting. I think it is really mixed in different organisations, the sort of focus, I guess, on community management.
But I think Shailesh, you made the point around it's a big part of the governance strategy and that is always an ongoing conversation, isn't it? What governance do we need in place? But I think the key thing with Viva Engage I find fascinating and Jeanette, you mentioned it in your talk that the kind of governance is around creating the space for the community and conversation to thrive. It's not about controlling or locking down and I think that's a really key piece of it. Time is pressing against us, right? I'm going to pick one more question that kind of wraps a couple of questions into one.
So, apologies, panelists, for a little bit of a strange question. But a lot of people are always asking about how do you get people to move from just being a consumer of content on Viva Engage to actually interacting? Now, obviously purpose, community management play a part in that, but I would love to get your thoughts on how you actually boost employee interaction and genuine participation on Viva Engage. Louise, can I start with you on this? Have you found ways to encourage more people to move from consuming to participating? What would you say is your key thing on that? So, what is actually really interesting about that question is that I am personally someone who would normally not engage that much.
I'm not privately, I'm not on social media. So, actually, it was really interesting to work with it on my own to also get a sense of how much acknowledgement actually means and how important it is. So, I think what's really important for us is that I come from an organisation that, like it's a really old institution, also have somewhat of a conservative mindset.
So, what has really helped us to make our colleagues feel comfortable and secure is definitely the informal tone of voice. It really has a big impact for us because the tone of voice in general can be a bit more informal, a bit more conservative. So, actually, offering a channel that allows our colleagues to just be humans and to have dialogues as we would if we met up has actually made a big change.
And that is also something that has actually surprised us a lot, that just by tweaking the tone of voice, by making it more human and adding some emojis, a lot more people would also actually just like to participate. And then it's also, of course, also to continuously acknowledge when someone actually also gives something of themselves and just say thank you for your input. It's really valued, but without making it sound like it's corporate BS.
But actually acknowledging that it means a lot because it really does, because we are really listening. So, acknowledging when they actually contribute is also a way of, again, living the purpose and show them that it actually means something and they can co-create with us, they can change things if they speak their minds. Yeah.
Great, great points. Shailesh, in terms of the Schneider Electric experience, what do you find works to get people to move from just being readers and consumers to actually interacting? In fact, that's a great question because we moved initially one of our KPI was to look into the active employees on the platform, which included the readers, which is not now the case. We are closely monitoring the number of interactive users instead, which means they need to do something on the platform, right? So, it's hard.
It's hard to push even by one percentage point, to be honest, and what we try to do is to leverage data at the heart of it is to see what kind of post work good. Of course, content is the king, right? We all know and talk about it, but in case we don't have that compelling content for all the employees to engage with it, what are the different other tactics that we can do? So, for us, when I see at the organisation level, a text-based post is less interactive overall in general. A post with a picture is almost two or three times more engaging and more interactions are happening on those posts versus a video where, again, I see a lot more interaction.
But to get a video has its own cost and own mechanism. We cannot have a video unless it's coming from Davos. Let's say somebody posted it from Davos and everyone jumps into acknowledging and posting and liking it.
So, that's a different story. For a general day-to-day post, I suppose it's difficult to do, but we can follow these basic rules to ensure that we get more visibility. And on top of that, I think what works well is to mention the SMEs.
I think in one of your slides, you also mentioned and talked about it. So, that's something which creates kind of a chain by involving SMEs. At times, you need to take help of the communicators in terms of internal communication.
When we are running some particular campaign, we want this kind of resonance effect, so to say, to happen across the community. We try to do it on purpose, which makes people interesting. And the third most important thing, which as a community owner, which I would say is to have the first response time less, as less as possible.
If possible, someone has made a post, acknowledge it. If there is something to be done about it, do it. If not, then at least maybe like a post, if it is a generic one in that sense, or do something about it if you can very actively.
So, if that is being done, people get a lot more validated of their post that they're doing, that someone is there to look into the post. If you draw parallel from the social validation in terms of external social media, you tend to try to have that kind of validation within organisation as well. If it is done, perfect.
If it is done on time, great. So, if that's possible, try to do it. If not, then we leave it to the flow of the communication.
Like you said, we don't want to control as much. We want it to flow freely as well. Now, great, great points.
Really some good practical sort of concepts for people to get their head around there. And then to wrap things up, Jeanette, for you, what do you see as really helping drive this shift from just passiveness to interactiveness? I mean, it's a great question. I think we have some great answers here already, and I can really relate to what was previously said.
I think also something we try to do a lot is to be very smart about how we craft the message. We had, for example, end of year posts from our CEO asking what was your most memorable moment this year? And of course, we didn't. It was a bit of a risk, because you never know how people are going to answer.
So, we did ask a couple of people, some friends, asking friends to have some answers ready just to start the conversations. But the interesting part was that we had a couple of people just ready with the answers, but actually, we didn't even need them, because it actually organically generated comments. It was our CEO.
I mean, people, it's all small. I mean, we can be transparent. It's a little bit of a, you know, self-promotion as well.
You can see your name in the feed commenting. So, I mean, yeah, be very smart about how you craft your message. And of course, what works is carrots.
I mean, I mentioned something with our sponsorship competitions. If people get a chance to win something, for example, it doesn't have to be like a trip to a sports event. It could be something much, much smaller.
And also, I would say, I mean, I do a lot of parallels to external communications when I talk to people, because it's all about reminding people, reminding the education and the awareness. It's an ongoing work. But it's sometimes when I'm a bit on a provocative mode, I would ask, when I see people post a lot on their LinkedIn account, they'll say, well, what's the last time you posted on our internal social media channel? And then it's like, we'll see.
So, it's always about, I would say, reminding, reminding and reminding. And lead by example. Of course, with the comms teams and the marketing teams, they should be, you know, already there.
So, if you identify people who aren't, you maybe want to have a conversation. Yeah, yeah. Hey, to the three of you, thank you so much.
It's been really a pleasure having you, hosting you. And I can only say thank you so many times for the time and effort and energy you've put into preparing your presentations, delivering them and then sharing your knowledge in this panel session afterwards. I really, really appreciate it.
I know from the comments in the chat and from all of the emojis that have been flying around, the audience have appreciated it too. I hope the three of you are ready for lots of connection requests and questions from people that will come directly after today's session. But yeah, thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate you all taking the time and giving to the community.
Meet the speaker:
Shailesh Kumar
Schneider Electric
Louise Durmus Kay
Danske Bank
Jeanette Vikbacka Castaing
Capgemini
