From insights to impact: Building high-engagement communities through data, dialogue and daily wins.
Schneider Electric
EMEA | Viva Engage Festival 2025
Learning from surveys & taking action: "From Insights to Impact", Open dialogue & empowerment: "Dialogue". Leadership nudges & culture reinforcement: Implied in "Building High-Engagement Communities". Celebrating wins & functional alignment: "Daily Wins".
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Now, it gives me great pleasure to hand over to Shailesh from Schneider Electric. So I've been working alongside Shailesh for a number of years now, and one of the things I always feel before I jump into a meeting with Shailesh is like, ah, excited, brilliant, I'm going to get loads of interesting questions from this guy. So Shailesh really gets data, and today he's going to share a case study about how they make an impact with Viva Engage at Schneider Electric.
So Shailesh, welcome, great to have you here, and I will hand over to you, if you want to bring up your slides and share screen, like I say, we keep it very casual and simple here, so I'll hand to you, I'll stop sharing, and if you share screen, fire away with your talk. Thank you. Sure, sure, thanks, Pete, and I hope I'm audible to everyone.
Can anyone confirm, please? All good, great. So thank you, Pete. So I am Shailesh, working as a communications performance manager within Schneider for last over seven and a half years.
I take care of all the different analytics across different communication channel and content, which ranges from intranet site, videos, of course, newsletter, and SOOP for Viva Engage, right? So I look into the narratives of all different channels. Before I begin, I would, you know, first like to thank SOOP and all the organizers who are responsible for this year's Viva Engage festival, so a big kudos to them. Among, now to begin, among many options that I had to pick up in terms of case studies, in terms of internal analysis and benchmark that we usually do, very often leveraging SOOP analytics, today I thought of sharing story of a community over here, which is ranked among the top communities as per SOOP's latest benchmark report.
So a community which is managed by a colleague of mine, Lisa Emanuel, who is possibly here or not here, I'm not sure, who had the vision and the collaborative instinct basically to work together to create the impact at the end of the day, right? So the story which I'm going to talk about is about curiosity, teamwork, and action, CTA, call to action, as you may want to call it. For this, I'm going to share my screen and show you the details of it. Let me go ahead and if Pete or someone can quickly confirm if you are able to see my screen, that would be great.
Awesome, let me put it on full screen. So when Lisa joined in, this is a community, let me first introduce and talk a bit about the community. It is called HND community, which has over 5000 plus members in it and there are more non-members also who are participating in the community as we all know, right? So when she joined in over here, she wanted to first understand the comms channel preference and the kind of content the community members were interested in, which means that she wanted to dig deeper into understanding the audience first before pushing for any communication on Viva Engage community and I felt that was a great strategy.
So what was done is to float a survey which was shared across the community and also over email at time with a decent response rate, which was significant enough to draw conclusions out of it. The kind of questions which were asked was about the type of content you are more interested in, which gave you a lot of insight about the different categories of content that we created as a response. Then we wanted to understand the channel preference, which platform do you usually go to and which platform do you prefer for such kind of information.
Also, if you have any particular preference towards any particular format or style of communication, whether it is an infographic, videos, text, short text, etc. So all these kind of questions gave us a huge lot of insight about the preference of the community members, right? So this was very insightful as an overall exercise to get a lot more insight and based on which we were able to frame the right business problem and to strategize around that business problem to make sure that we leverage everything what we did as part of the survey. Moving on, what we learned from the survey was, you know, the pain points, the topics and what they like as channel.
So pain points, too much noise. I think this is something which a lot of us would agree that is common if we go out to employees and ask them this question. So too much noise or over communication, in other words, is something one or two or, you know, many times we will come to know about.
So it was not a surprise to us, although we had made conscious effort to reduce lot of noise on Viva Engage and any other channel for that matter, right? And the second insight was also coming as no single source of information, right? So this came out as a surprise to us considering Viva Engage, we do not consider Viva Engage to be a single source of information. Maybe the responder wanted to be more aware of other single source of information, which is our intranet in our case, right? And Viva Engage, we wanted to keep it to the purpose of Viva Engage, which is to foster employee engagement and build communities within the organization. So all these were very important insights for us.
And the topics that they suggested were a mix of both people and business topic. What stood out to us was to was that was the fact that the employees were also a lot more interested in understanding the competition, the market trends. So they were not just interested in the people and the business within Schneider, but outside of Schneider as well.
And this gave us an insight and a call to action that we try to mix up the content to improve on the employee engagement, right? So this is what we learned to organize content more and to create a more centralized way of sharing all information, whether it is people or business topic, create, you know, unique and innovative campaigns around it and share it with employees on the Viva Engage community. Moving on, using the insights which we got from the survey, an objective was created. What we wanted to do was to increase the employee engagement on the community by 20% or more.
It's a big and humongous target to have in the beginning. And very honest, we are not past the target that we wanted to reach, but we are close and by the end of the year, very likely we should be able to do that. But what we did to achieve that, or to get that particular lift that we have from the beginning of the year, was to create awareness about all these different topics that employees wanted to understand and know about, was also to include the leadership, you know, make more leadership posts which encouraged employees to, you know, involve and collaborate on Viva Engage a lot more.
So the overall idea was to foster an inclusive and respectful workplace culture within the community, and that's how we wanted to increase employee engagement. And this translated into, when you look at the numbers closely, this translated into an increased number of posts done by the members, 28% more. And also, at the end of the day, we also had more interactive members, as per the definition of SWOOP, who makes a like, comment, share, or a post on Viva Engage community.
We saw an increase in that as well, by over 3% versus last year. Everything translated into overall employee engagement, which we are currently monitoring, and we are hopeful that we will cross the target that we had set at the beginning of the year, which was 20%. All right.
With all these things in mind, while we were doing this, you know, I'll just want to talk about two campaigns. One is a people campaign, and another one is more of a business campaign, which helped in driving a lot of communication and engagement among the employees within the Viva Engage community that we are talking about. So one of the campaigns was about blogs.
So we had this, the team actually had this idea of having an internal blog page where the employees shared their story, which, you know, connected them with each other outside of their work. So they did not share stories around the work, but outside of their work. And those stories, those blog pages were promoted on the Viva Engage community, right? And there we saw huge engagement coming on those kind of posts, people engaging and talking about things, getting to know about each other, and that made them, you know, more collaborative and engaged on the community.
And so that's one story about a campaign. The second story about another campaign was more of a business one where we were celebrating 100 years. 100 years was the, at the center of the campaign, which is the centennial of MCB, which is a product of HND community.
They are very much interested in this particular product and to see it complete 100 years, maybe made them a lot more excited. They engaged a lot more on Viva Engage. Of course, this campaign was also done in the traditional way where we also put it on the offices, put it on the newsletter article, put it on the article page as well of the intranet site, but Viva Engage engagement was very important.
And this particular campaign helped us drive that particular engagement as well. As you can see the numbers of post penetration and average engagement also around this topic to be high. With this, I conclude and at the end of it, you know, I'll take up questions, but I would like to thank Cecile.
I hope she is there on the call, who is the channel owner for Viva Engage and Martha. I don't know if she's around, joining the call to give me this opportunity to talk about it in the Viva Engage festival today. Thank you both.
Any questions? So, Shailesh, I've got one question just to pick up and it may be Cecile or others on the call might jump off mute and add to this, but you mentioned how you saw leadership involvement being really key to driving this increase in engagement. I think you set a very ambitious target with that 20 percent growth. But so leadership was a key piece.
How do leaders make an impact? Is it really complicated or do they just need to do, you know, something like what do you see at Schneider Electric with leaders? How do they make an impact? See, leaders, they do really make an impact and I I can say for sure about Schneider Electric how employees react and engage over the post made by leaders. So, you'll generally see a lot of engagement or above benchmark or more the next times versus any regular post and by any employee comms or any other member. To have the leaders on board, it was a conscious effort which was made by the, you know, comms leadership team to engage with the leaders to encourage them.
You know, we use generally one of the formulas that is coming out right from one of the pages of soup, I think one, two, three, where we encourage leaders to make one post, two comments and three likes regularly on a regular cadence. So, they keep and feel make the employees feel closer to them. So, that's a conscious effort which was done and that's something which was done by the team over here in this particular community as well, where the engagement was picked up while the leaders also engaged on the community.
Yeah, yeah and so it doesn't need to be a big burden sometimes for the leaders, it's just the consistency. It's the consistency, yes, and I think what's best is to have one post in a week, but that can also mean that you are over communicating at times. So, maybe a three to four post, I've seen leaders from different geographies, different job functions, etc, doing a range of four to 24 posts in a quarter.
So, it can be more, it can be less, but I think it's really important to have leaders on boarded on, be very engaged to stay connected with the employees. Yeah, and I guess that's where the comms practitioner comes in, right? Is there there to guide the leader on what the right level of communication for their context is? Yes, that's true. With Viva Engage, you also have the benefit of being a two-way channel.
You can listen, so you'll start to hear signals from people if the leader is over communicating or under communicating, I imagine. Sorry, what's the question was Pete? Can you please repeat? How do you, on Viva Engage, you can see immediately, like if a leader is over communicating, you would expect to see maybe the interactions with them drop off a little bit as people are pulling back perhaps? Do you see it in your data? On certain occasions, it has happened as well, it still is, and that is communicated to the leaders as well. So, we make sure that when leaders are involved, the team members are also involved in tracking and monitoring how their posts are performing.
The idea is to optimize in terms of number of posts that you make and to get the engagement rate that you wish to have. Yeah, it's interesting because I'm sure there's many people on the call today who aren't fortunate enough to have SWOOP available to them, but it's interesting the concept of just looking, constantly referencing the data to adapt over time. I know that you do a lot of that, you're always looking at the data.
On the data front, one other question from me before I'll jump to the Q&A and just read out a couple of the questions that have come in there. You mentioned that you're, it sounds like you're sort of connecting your engagement data in the company to the Viva Engage data as well. So, you look at the data from Viva Engage to see the engagement levels there, but then when you're talking about the engagement data, are you saying you compare your Viva Engage engagement data with maybe the HR engagement survey or something like this? Do you, is that what you're comparing there? No, we are not doing that.
We are not drawing parallels and, you know, we kind of give for now equal weightage to all the channels as well. So, it's not just Viva Engage, but the intranet newsletter videos, all the channels have equal weightage in improving the overall engagement rate. So, we have another HR engagement survey, just like what you mentioned, and we see improvement year over year, but we cannot directly correlate it with the engagement levels we are increasing on Viva Engage because it's happening across different channels as well.
So, we give equal weightage across, yeah. Yeah, that's interesting though about having that engagement data across all of your channels. I think that's something a lot of people would love to put together.
Pete, just that I know Cecile has made it. She was, unfortunately, probably due to trapped in a long meeting. So, Cecile, I might just spotlight Cecile as well, so she can share the stage with Ms Shailesh.
Great. Excellent. Cecile, I know how much you love being on camera, so let's put you front and centre.
Great to have you here, Cecile. I just wonder if there's anything that you'd like to share now we've put you in the spotlight around what really makes Viva Engage and community tick. What are some of the things that you see? This is right off the top of your head, but just to share whilst you're here with the whole community, what would you say are a couple of things that really make a difference to engagement on Viva Engage? Give me a second just to turn on my camera.
One of the successes we have at Schneider, so first, hello, everyone. Sorry, Shailesh, I missed your presentation, but I will watch it. One of the successes we have at Schneider is that we have different groups, I would say.
We have the communications team, which is monitoring Viva Engage, and we are active on it. We also have our communities of practice, communities at work, and this is a specific programme led by HR, and they have more than 100 different communities, if I'm not wrong. They are very active and spreading the word on how to use Viva Engage and how to be active there.
And then we have all employees who just joined Viva Engage to discuss with others, to share what they are doing in their day-to-day life at work. So that's one of the successes, those three groups, but yeah, Viva Engage without employees cannot work at all, so we need to make sure they are active, and that's what we are doing. Great, so this is the thing of being really intentional about encouraging the activity, and I think that's what's always impressed me with you and the team, that you're really intentional.
It is a mission to help people be more active because it's to their benefit, that if you're active, if you contribute, it's like you get back what you give, right? So the more you give, the more you get back. I just want to quickly run through a couple of the questions, so one that came right at the start of the presentation when you talked about the survey data you got, Shailesh. Anna has asked, before doing that survey, did you already use Viva Engage or did you use another tool for corporate news and comms? No, we always have been using Viva Engage, but while we wanted to do the survey, it was primarily because we wanted to improve on the engagement rate and we wanted to understand what kind of content people are finding more relevant for them.
So Viva Engage has been at the centre of our channel strategy for a long period now. We have seen the shift happening across different geographies on Viva Engage, by which I mean that we have seen drop in engagement on certain channels and Viva Engage has increased over a period of time. We are keeping track of that as well.
So Viva Engage was and possibly will remain at the centre of everything that we are doing as part of communication. Great, great. Another question from Debra at Santander.
Debs, good to have you here. Debs has asked, is your all-company Viva Engage community open for all employees to post? If so, how do you manage the all-company community so it doesn't get flooded with stuff and noise? Interesting and good question, which I'll answer and I'll also ask Cecil to drop in with her comments on this. But yes, this all-company Viva Engage community is actually open for all.
In fact, by default, anyone who is having access to the emails, they are part of all employees community. We see a lot of engagement happening over there and we also see a lot of relevant or, you know, I wouldn't say that we have seen or come across any such post which is not relevant or which is something which we can categorize as spam, etc., which might require some kind of monitoring or intervention. But I suppose it has been quite engaging overall for everyone to have, you know, that open for open dialogue and communication on any community to be talked about across the company.
So that's the way it is right now and it is by default available to all the employees. Cecil, you want to add something to this? Yeah, that's true. It's open.
We don't really monitor it. We change just the cover banner for our campaigns. But we haven't received any complaint on that specific group.
I received a lot on many other groups, but no one has ever complained about the activity. It just helps employees meet others, honestly. It's like whenever you have a question, some will just post it in this group and either someone will answer or someone will just move the question to the correct group.
So it's really free and fun to meet other colleagues from around the world. Yeah, and we have huge space. I think it's something which we have not done and I think we have been very fortunate that we never had to intervene or to do anything about all employee community because it's a base of over around 150K plus employees and it's doing all fine by itself.
It's good. I mean, I can't really think of many times I've heard of people actually having problems with posts on Viva Engage. It happens very, very rarely.
I think the fear of that happening is much greater than the reality of it happening, right? So that's your experience. And we always sort of say to people, look, your community is a good, your community of people, your employees are good, professional, sensible people. So you can generally trust them.
And it's, you know, it's very rare that something bad happens. Now I've cursed it and everyone's going to have terrible things about it. We've got time just for one more question and I do apologize for everyone who's put questions in the Q&A.
Cecile and Shailesh, maybe after you're off screen, you could jump into the Q&A and give some comments to the questions you've got because there's quite a few in there. I do just want to pick one that's quite a big one in a short time. But how do you manage governance on Viva Engage? I know this is on a lot of people's minds.
Do you set expiration dates on groups? Do you do a yearly audit? Do you allow anyone to create a community or is there a process? Cecile, your facial expressions then made me want to come to you straight away for this one. Yeah, that one is for me. Today there is no actual governance on Viva Engage.
We're working with our digital team to implement those life cycles for groups. We do have a life cycle which states that a community that has been inactive for the past two years will be deactivated. The thing is that by activity they mean anything.
So if you decide to visit the SharePoint site that goes with the group, then it's an activity. But if you don't post in the group, that's not an activity. So we're still looking at it to make sure that we can remove those inactive groups and we have plenty of those.
Then anyone can create a group on Viva Engage today. We are also looking at tweaking it a bit in the sense that we have one big community open to all employees, which is the whole company group, and then any other group should be limited to the community. So that's two points that we are looking at in 2025 and 2026.
And then in the governance we have the moderations that I lead with the compliance team to make sure that any comments that is not compliant with our trust charter will be dealt with HR, etc. But that has not happened often, I had to say, so I'm quite happy. Good stuff, good stuff.
Hey, we are at time on this and we are casual and relaxed here at SWOOP, but we do like to stick to time. So can I just say a massive thank you, Shailesh, for sharing that case study and just talking to the data points and the way I love, you know I love the way that you look at the data and you use that to inform your tactics and your strategy to drive engagement. It's very impressive and really good to just have a clear example of how that can be done, how the insights you get from the data drives the action.
So thank you for sharing that. And thank you, Cecile, for unwittingly being put front and centre of stage by us, but good spirit to smile as that happened and answer questions and share your knowledge. Thank you so much, Schneider Electric team, for presenting the first session at today's Viva Engage festival.
Meet the speaker:
Shailesh Kumar
General Manager, Communications Performance Management
