Employee Engagement Strategy Driven By People At CAMS: Shobana Priya
Shobhna, congratulations to you and your organisation for winning the Excellence in employee engagement strategy at the BW People HR Excellence Awards 2023. In your view, what is unique about the employee engagement policy at Computer Age Management Services?
At the outset, I would like to thank BW People for institutionalising such people forums and awards to showcase the People strategy of various organisations. This indeed provides an avenue for sharing and learning the best practices from across a varied stream of industries.
In any organization, employee engagement is a big ask and there is enough and more research that has been done to show its significance and importance. The role of HR becomes significant. What if we invert the pyramid and involve employees running the initiatives while HR manages the overall governance framework?
That is exactly what we at CAMS did with our employee engagement strategy, i.e., Driven by the people of CAMS.
Living by the truest principles of democratization, the “CAMS Communities”, our employee engagement wing, is indeed a conglomerate of hiving clubs, founded by the elected leaders from the organisation. A highly empowered workgroup which brainstorms, ideates, listens to employees on the ground and co-creates solutions.
One other key goal was to unearth the hidden talent and potential of our people by creating innovative visibility platforms for them to demonstrate.
Leading to higher engagement levels, empowered work groups and a fun-filled environment through teaming, synergy & creativity. A unique way of harnessing people’s talent and potential and building a true Bottoms-up, Inverting the Pyramid Concept at work.
How have employee engagement practices evolved in the hybrid model of working?
CAMS operates from 280 plus locations and some a quite remote which means that one needs to have ways and means to reach to every employee working out of our remotest offices too.
The communities team devised programs as they understand their colleagues even much better and crafted out program frameworks for engaging our outstation employees through Virtual programs such as Weekend Yoga, Workplace Ergonomics, CAMS Super Singer Virtually Yours, Online Chess Olympiad, amongst many others. Leveraging technology has been the cornerstone of our engagement model, through the last few years.
The biggest fun was when we had the elections to select our “Communities” President, Vice-President, Secretary and Treasurer. The whole organization came into live action and the bonding that it created was phenomenal. Thanks to Technology and the thinking processes of our amazing teams.
How do you measure employee engagement within organizations, and what metrics or indicators do you use to assess the level of engagement and identify areas for improvement?
The journey in the last 12 months saw a Whooping 120+ events conducted, which speaks for itself the success of the community framework and the power of people's cohesive actions. Just alone the HR team driving such initiatives would not have achieved such staggering numbers. The power of collective approach and "Inverting the Pyramid" reaped huge employee traction.
Employee energy and stickiness factor has been a big ask and one of the lag factors that one could measure is the Attrition %. CAMS saw a drop of 4% over last year's attrition.
Employer Branding and our Social Media presence saw huge traction with many employees, professional fraternity and CAMS Alumni responding and supporting the various events. Specific efforts were made to highlight employees and their achievements thereby providing high visibility and a platform to reach to larger audience.
Can you discuss your experience in leveraging technology and HR analytics to measure and track employee engagement?
Technology and Analytics are today bedrock for a lot of initiatives that one can plan through and drive in the People practices space. Whether it is the very basic HRIS database or to that of policy creation based on the feedback that we get from employees through the various surveys that we do.
Communities' initiative was no alien to technology. When we launched the election process to select our club leaders, technology was very handy to conduct free and fair elections.
The casting of votes was done through physical ballots to create hype in our large centres to that of e-voting for our employees from various corners of the country to share their rights. Employees could track the live counting of ballots too.
Communication forms a large part of any engagement program and usage of our social media platforms both internally and externally has played a significant role in publicizing our initiatives. Employees' feedback over the various initiatives is tracked and accordingly improvised for better reach and appropriate connections.
