The Role of Social Media as a Tool to Boost Employee Engagement in Capgemini

The role of Social media as a tool to boost Employee Engagement in Capgemini

Introduction

The human resource management industry is the spine of any organisation. With the world getting transformed into a technological village, Strategic HR is changing the Human Resource Management’s traditional rulebook. Strategic Human Resource Management is a transformational practice that initiates change and promotes usage of control mechanism that helps generate results. This essay is a case study of how Capgemini Consulting Strategic HR team adopted Social Media as a mechanism to boost communication and connectivity for boosting Employee Engagement, to generate increased organisational performance.

Right from identifying the most important issues & posing strategic questions so as to make it convenient for the managers in making more informed decisions, to completely change the way people connect and share information, social media is bi-dimensionally changing the Organisational Behaviour across industries. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter YouTube, MySpace (as external social media channels) Connect, yammer etc (as internal social media channels) have technologically transformed the way people connect and share information via networking. The applications have the potential to revolutionize a wide variety of organizational functions, most importantly, to Engage Employees.

The Social Business Imperative

With about 115,000 employees in more than 40 countries, Capgemini Consulting is one of the world’s largest professional service providers. Despite of the massive presence, when the clouds of dismay blanketed Capgemini in 2009, it shattered all traditional illusions of running a company based on materialistic goals. The payroll started becoming a burden on the company rather than an investment. The lack of employee engagement was costing the organization approximately forty five percent (45%) of the payroll. Capgemini paid its employees hundred percent (100% including the base pay and benefits), however, over forty percent (40%) of that money was getting wasted because employees were not performing up to the level of what they were capable of. It was a high time that Capgemini learned the value of employee engagement to turn their payroll into an investment.

Employee engagement, if taken care of in an organisation, enables collaboration and communication thereby increases productivity. It refers to a “heightened emotional connection that an employee feels for his or her organization, that influences them to exert greater discretionary effort to their work". (Gibbons 2006). Employee engagement aims to bring about a situation in which the employee by free choice has an intrinsic desire to work in the best interests of the organisation. (Hellevig, Jon 2012)

Engaged employees