From conversation to transformation
Tata Steel
APAC | Viva Engage Festival 2024
Empowering employees to move from volunteering conversations to actionable participation using Viva Engage, witnessed a shared association of moral identity. Volunteering has been part of the Tata Steel organisational DNA for over a century. Sneha will share how Viva Engage led to the strengthening of the Tata Steel volunteering identity. This conversation-led transformation connected the workforce with a common sentiment that positioned the organisation strongly in the community-centric narrative.
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Next speaker for our 2024 Viva Engage Festival is Sneha Biswas from Tata Steel. So Sneha is the Senior Manager for Corporate Communications and this is a really interesting story actually. So at Tata Steel, they have been using Viva Engage as the go-to platform to amplify conversations about volunteering and outcomes from volunteering.
And this is a really, really cool story for any organisations who are wanting to see the impact that depth of conversation through Viva Engage can have for embedding more of your organisational value. So I'll hand over to you now, Sneha. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Emily. I'll just share my screen. You let me know if it's visible.
Yes, please. That's visible now. And then just in presentation mode, it's just fantastic.
Good to go. Yeah. So hi, everyone.
I'm Sneha from India. This is morning here. So good morning from India to everyone who's joined online.
Thank you so much, Emily, for giving me this opportunity. So I'll just briefly speak about my company first and then how we have used a platform like Viva Engage to sort of translate conversation to actual action oriented transformative culture. So I'll speak briefly about my company first and then how volunteerism sort of pegs our entire social relationship capital in the overall agenda of our organisation.
What was the challenge and how did we identify the opportunities and what was the consequence? So, yeah, we are a steel making company. We are 35 million tonne per annum in capacity. We have about 78,000 employees across the globe, including frontline and, you know, white collar, blue collar employees.
We have operations across Canada, India, Europe, Thailand and Netherlands. And so we are across the globe here. So I'll briefly touch upon the values that are on the right side.
So our founder, Mr. Jane Tata, he founded this company about 150 years ago with the values that are listed on the right. Integrity, responsibility, excellence, piloting and unity. And these are the five pillars on which the entire workforce of Tata Steel actually operates.
Responsibility is something that we really take care of our community. In fact, our founder said that the sole purpose of the existence of our enterprise is actually community. And more than 70 percent of our revenues actually go in the CSR activities so that, you know, we can actually do something about the people for whom we are actually operating.
Next, so we have a lot of activities that we do for our society. Volunteering becomes a peg where we sort of use our employees for hours, volunteering hours and map them into something really meaningful. And we cater to a lot of social causes, right from animal welfare to women empowerment to, you know, right to education, good food, good health, cleanliness, the environment.
And we are all aligned to the SDG goals. And the main aim of having this entire volunteering piece into our organisation is that, you know, we want to have this society perspective into our business operations. We want to understand what the communities think about us and how do they want us to serve them.
And this is where we, you know, we empower all of our employees to go and talk to people around them and see and provide value to them. So the challenge here is what we had done initially, the volunteering had been going on for a long time, but we were not able to map exactly how many volunteering hours are actually. We knew the outcome, we knew that how many people we were touching into, we knew how many kids are there in the schools to whom we are, you know, teaching.
But we really did not know how many employees were actually volunteering. And so we launched this portal of purpose where employees who were volunteering needed to come back and log their volunteering hours. The challenge here was that the volunteering was happening, but we were not having any sort of data or numbers for us to understand what was the input.
And then comes the momentum of, you know, it's just not a conversation and it's just not campaign-led. So there's a volunteering week that's going on, you need to volunteer just then. It's something that we needed to sustain all around the year.
Then the PCVH. PCVH is one KPI that we started monitoring, that's per capita volunteering hour. Each employee was expected to volunteer at least two hours.
You can go up to whatever number of hours, but at least two hours so that we can all come together and create some meaningful impact, some tangible impact. The last year we had about six companies merged into Tata Steel. Inducting them into this whole, you know, into this whole system and to help them understand that what volunteering means to us, what does social capital mean to us, was again another challenge.
And then we wanted to move on from, you know, it's nice to have, okay, we are volunteering, okay, it's good. But then, no, it's something that we have to do. It's something that is, you know, that has cascaded down from a founder like 150 years ago.
And we are all proud of working at Tata Steel for a reason. And this is one of the reasons that binds us together. So, with all of these challenges, what we did is we created a framework.
We launched the Portal of Purpose where we sort of started logging on, but we were not getting enough, you know, people to get into it. So, first we created a framework and then I just talked through pictures, no text and all. I hope that's okay, but I'm ready to answer questions whenever it comes.
So, on the left, you can see the Portal of Purpose was launched by our leadership. We started talking about it and we were engaged. We sort of started giving people an idea that, you know, Portal of Purpose is something that actually will help us understand that, you know, we are finding our purpose.
And you can see what are the existing volunteering opportunities that you can participate in. You can do a DIY sort of thing also. You can go self-initiate, come back and volunteer as well.
So, we created a framework around it. Then we sort of went ahead and started showcasing ongoing identity work. Now, this area is where we were engaged, sort of helped us in binding people together with a common emotion.
So, in the last presentation by, I think, Sharon and Lawrence, we saw that fund-based posts received the most engagement. Here, what we saw that people were having fun interacting with these people. You know, there was this sentiment of, okay, that's nice.
It's just not always, you know, corporate-y things and meetings and all. It's a part of our job. Our company allows us to go and volunteer within working hours and that's absolutely legal.
And people were finding a lot of happiness and it was so amazing to see everyone, you know, come together. And when the ongoing identity work was actually showcased when we were engaged, a lot of people started following those footsteps. A lot of people started, you know, okay, let's also do this together.
So, this started on the right-hand side. You see a lot of campaigns that were actually acting as triggers for our employees to, you know, sustain the momentum. So, we have planned an internal communication campaign all throughout the years in breaks of two months or three months so that, you know, we keep on constantly nudging people to keep doing this work and keep logging the hours.
We needed the PCBH numbers. The PCBH target was about 2.5 to 3 last year and we were just barely at one. But through these, we saw that the numbers were increasing and we were sort of reaching our target.
Cultivating contagious champions. This is again one of the most important things that we started doing and we sort of highlighting, started highlighting and telling stories about people who had actually made change on ground. So, on the left, you can see this security professional who is from the security department, but he's done about 150 rescue missions and he has, he's an expert and he's a diver and he sort of rescues people when there's a flood, when there's a lot of other disasters across the country.
He goes there and he manages, brings people out of their homes. There are landslides. He's been there and he's got them out of their homes and it's an excellent story.
And when we started posting that story, people sort of started realising that how important it is for us to, you know, go and it's just about few hours. It's just about giving that little bit of time and that extra bit of effort. So, there were a lot of people who were thinking that, okay, I should go and do when I should volunteer.
But when these stories started coming out, when they were sort of put under the spotlight. So, we sort of started cultivating these model exemplars for their peers to start recruiting them into this entire volunteering story, you know. Then we had, we sort of nominated these volunteering champions across the departments and divisions.
We asked the leadership to nominate them and we spotlighted them that in case you're finding any issues, you can always go to them because we are diverse and we are across all locations. So, it was not possible for, you know, a team of three or four to cater to a 70,000 plus workforce. So, we sort of did that and then we also highlighted them and their efforts and then it started sort of growing and it was amazing.
It is just like a chain reaction. These stories were just catalysts, but the chain reaction is just exploded. And once people started posting about their own stories, more people started posting, seeing them more people started posting and it just took off and we're so proud of the stories that are really so heartwarming that we sort of not only reached our target, we actually surpassed it and the kind of community engagement that we saw was amazing.
These are a few more trigger points. We had leadership advocacy. We had a lot of debate around why are we doing volunteering? Why is it necessary? Why is it something that the organisation is pushing? What will an employee gain out of it? I mean, it should be entirely self-voluntary and there were so many viewpoints and it was such a transparent session.
So, more people came up with more views, people started talking about it. So, the whole point as an internal communicator, our point was to keep the conversation happening. It was not about just going on ground work, but the volunteering thing should be something that people should always be talking about.
Only then we can convert, translate, you know, conversations into action-oriented transformations. So, yeah. So, consequence was organically a lot of media started picking up that, you know, we've celebrated these volunteering weeks, we are empowering communities.
I've given only a few screenshots. There were lots of social media stories that picked up organically. Our mother company, the Tata Group, it picked up a lot of good stories.
It started acknowledging people. We had this rewards and recognition system also, where employees with exceptional volunteering hours were awarded so that, you know, they also inspired people to do something great like that. And at the end of the year, we ended up with 82,933 volunteering hours from, you know, just a few thousand hours.
And that was a great, you know, increase. We saw an 857% increase in the PCBH. We saw 1029% increase in the total volunteering hours in a year.
And the media just picked it up and we were so happy that it was just organically how we were engaged actually helped us in, you know, positioning these stories into a way that everybody was talking about it. So, yeah, that's about it. I thought I'd put some impactful pictures from this community work as well.
These are the kids that we regularly interact with. So, yeah. So, any questions I'm happy to answer.
I'll just stop sharing. Thank you so much. Thank you, Sneha.
The reason why I love this story so much is because we're not necessarily focusing on the challenge of being, you know, how do we get more people on Viva Engage, you know, looking at data to see, you know, how many posts, how many people, how many active users, whatever it may be. I love that your story has started with an organisational goal and an organisational outcome. And then you have seen Viva Engage as the platform to achieve that goal.
So, I love how it's followed that journey as opposed to it being, you know, the outcome being more engagement on Viva Engage. It's just an interesting and a different way to look at this as a platform. And being able to achieve those goals that you've mentioned as well.
So, it's PVCH or PCVH per capita volunteering hours. I'm learning as I go as well. It's great that you're able to check that against outcomes.
And for anyone who is listening into today's session as well, I strongly encourage you to do the same with any of your communities that do have that organisational outcome focus or if it's a particular team. Think about how you can measure some of those outcomes as a result of the great conversation that's happening in a Viva Engage community or that's happening as a result of a cool campaign that you may be running. It's just a different way to have a look at it.
So, I strongly encourage as well for anyone who has questions, please do pop them into the Q&A. I can see there's a bit of commentary in the chat as well, Sneha, just about, you know, those incredible results that you've achieved. So, thank you also for sharing those.
Let me just jump into the Q&A. Okay. So, can you give one minute on internal comms at Tata Steel? Oh, maybe, Sneha, if you can maybe share a little bit about the landscape of internal comms at Tata Steel.
Like, this is just one particular community that we're focused on, but we'd love to hear more about the broader picture. Yeah. So, we have internet, we have mass mailers that we send out to our employees, we have Viva Engage, we have SMSs, message based systems, we have kiosks, we have digital voting.
So, these are all internal communication platforms, but in different formats. So, there are a lot of frontline workers who are not digitally connected or who have shared systems based on their roles. So, we use these boardings for them to actually see what's happening across the organisation.
So, this is our overall landscape. What we did in this particular point is that when we started, you know, sending messages across the employees in the form of emails or SMS or internet, all of them pointed directly to Viva Engage. So, what we were doing is that any sort of, you know, point of contact with an employee regarding a conversation, the call to action led them to Viva Engage.
They sort of start having an understanding what's happening in the community. Best part of Viva Engage is that they have enabled this announcement option through which an email and a Teams trigger goes to people who are actually a part of that group. So, for example, if we have five community managers, we make them the admin, and the star stories, we use to post them as announcements.
So, when people started receiving them at frequency, they were intrigued, oh my god, let me see what's happening. Okay, so this is what is happening. So, you know, I need to engage with them.
I need to understand. I need to be a part of this whole overall story. And they reached out to us and they said, what can we do? I said, which is nothing.
You just go and start volunteering and talk about it. Just that's it. It's just like Facebook posts.
So, there was a question I had asked Leona in the previous session that how are you triggering your silent observers? So, what we did here is that this was a sentiment that actually intrigued people to talk about it. Okay, I did this and they wanted to show it. So, I mean, everybody wants to be seen.
Okay, I'm doing this. So, that was a natural, organic way of getting people to talk about it. Once they started posting even a silly comment like an okay in a post full of stories.
So, we started acknowledging it. Okay, great, at least there's a start and now you can start commenting on it and engaging on it. So, this is how it picked up.
I'm breaking it down and making it really simple for your end users too. Like we think about it kind of in the same way that we look at it for like the social communities, right? Like there's that really low barrier to entry. So, when we look at those conversations about volunteering, it's naturally quite easy to share about the cool things that you've been doing and to share that message across, you know, that broader community too.
I'm also thinking Sneha, like for your community, like sort of drilling down to the volunteering example again, and you kind of set this up at the start of your session. Tata Steel has a very geographically dispersed workforce, like you're across, you know, several different countries. Is this a community where you see people across all of those different countries sharing their experiences too? No, so right now we have not merged the platforms as yet.
So, Netherlands has its own VivaEngage community. UK has its own VivaEngage community because of GDPR rules and all. So, we are still figuring that out.
That's on the charts. That would actually involve a lot of other things as well. But yes, we are looking at merging everything so that we have conversations across the globe and understand perspective from different geographies.
Excellent. And then I just also have a question as well. A major part of having this work is that leadership advocacy piece.
I know you spoke a little bit about the importance of the voice of leaders, but is there anything in particular that you did to bring leaders along on that journey with you? Did you sort of coach them through it to also share their experiences? What did that look like? Yeah. So, we created a toolkit for them that, you know, this is what we are doing. This is what the organisation and this was actually a top-down approach.
This had come from the leaders that, you know, we want people to be talking about it. So, we already had their buy-in. We did not need to, you know, convince them a lot.
So, this had already come from the chairman and he sort of was very strong about, you know, this should be happening. But how this would happen is something that internal communicators jumped in and the whole strategy thing. And then we spoke to our leaders that this is what we are thinking of, what do you think, and they were all in, okay, so we are great to do that, whatever help you need.
We had multiple sessions with the leadership where they sort of nominated people and they also, you know, took names of those people who were actively involved in so many years. So, sort of to sort of create that sort of a thing that if this person can, anyone can. And it's not something of a rocket science.
So, that was one sentiment that we thought would resonate with everyone rather than just talk about a lot of official or corporate stuff where people are a little bit hesitant while participating. And beyond the volunteering community as well, like obviously you've seen some really strong results there. Are there any other stories from other parts of Viva Engage where you've seen some really great results, like any other campaigns or any other communities just off the top of your head that you've seen some really great activity happening on? See, as Lauren said, positive conversations always work, right? So, we have lots and lots of events across different geographies.
We have very good stories about them. We just concluded two of our major brand initiatives, which are marathons, and we had communities participating from across the country who had traveled more than thousand miles to, you know, reach here, come here, run in the race, and we posted their stories, and people started coming that, you know, they want to do it. And it sort of, again, depends on the subject as well.
Sports adventure is, again, another subject people really look forward to. So, we've seen that it's not always the corporate stuff thing, you know, that people would always want to participate. And the participation there is a little bit moderate.
It's the same users, but a diverse set of comments that we receive are mostly on the sports-related stuff, community-related stuff. So, stuff which are not very, you know, corporate-y. Thank you so much again, Sneha, for sharing all of these insights and sharing this story.
I'm sure people who are running specific communities on their networks will find this to be a particularly compelling story. Same goes for anyone who may be tackling a similar organisational challenge as well, in terms of sort of going back to your organisational values and seeing how they're coming to life across your network and throughout the organisation. So, if everyone could perhaps please, again, join me in thanking Sneha for sharing those insights today.
Really, really appreciate it.
Meet the speaker:
Sneha Biswas
Senior Manager, Corporate Communications
Tata Steel
