Wipro drives innovation and encourages social learning through Yammer
Today’s post was written by Anurag Seth, vice president and global head of Talent Transformation, TopGear, and Business Continuity at Wipro.
Digital transformation at Wipro includes a proactive evolution of our skills and qualifications to better serve customers. If Wipro is to help customers succeed on their own digital journeys, it’s critical that we stay ahead of the rapid evolution of technology in a world where cloud computing is the new normal. That means our employees need to become proficient with leading-edge technology concepts such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data to help customers gain business value from these latest innovations in IT.
Our challenge, then, is to manage the rapid pace of new training—e-learning and hands-on experience—which is required for more than 160,000 employees working in 62 countries to offer expertise in the kind of technology and services that will help customers solve 21st-century problems. We’re doing just that by choosing Office 365 collaborative cloud tools to help develop a social learning platform that uses the enterprise social network Yammer.
Although we deployed Yammer two years ago, today more than 4,000 public groups and 100,000 employees are active in our Yammer network, and we are one of the first companies to introduce the role of social officer to create a strategy for using Yammer as a social learning platform. The social officer encourages the formation of dedicated social learning groups on Yammer, and employees subscribe to those they are interested in. These groups could unite a single role, such as project manager, where participants in more than 175 cities across the globe share their challenges and learning at a scale and pace we could never achieve with traditional methods. Most of these groups come from the 40,000 members of our Talent and Transformation Yammer group, which represents the learning and development function at Wipro.
As soon as employees saw their contributions recognized by senior leaders—our CEO regularly follows Yammer threads and adds his input—there was a groundswell of participation. When a social learning group appeared for the first time in the top five most engaged Yammer groups at Wipro, it was a breakthrough. Today, of the top 100 most followed people in the organization, 51 are from social learning groups. That represents strong leadership in a culture change that’s happening organically at Wipro—for millennials who are joining the company now, as well as our long-term employees.
Yammer also supports an exciting new learning initiative called Topcoder for our crowdsourcing platform at Wipro. This initiative acts as a crowdsourcing mechanism to discover and develop new expertise across the organization. For Topcoder, we created training, case studies, and learning refinements that are open to all employees, along with exciting, real-life projects and challenges—all publicized through Yammer. As employees work on the projects, in their own time, they create groups and collaborate on Yammer to learn new skills and solve the challenges, gaining companywide recognition in the process. Over time, we are seeing the growth of permanent communities of practice on Yammer—mainframe, Java, architects, and consultants—which raises the level of discoverable expertise that we can bring to bear on behalf of our customers.
All this represents a culture change at Wipro that has huge business value. As more employees participate in Yammer-based social learning—sharing their expertise and engaging with the company—or participate in Topcoder’s projects to solve real-world problems, we’re developing better skills to more quickly serve customers. For example, a recent challenge in Topcoder that generated buzz on Yammer asked employees to create an exciting UI for a mobile app. We received many entries and awarded prizes to the top three designs. Now when a customer comes to us with a similar challenge, we have dozens of Topcoder participants with relevant experience, ready to go.
As the number of people participating in social learning increases, Yammer provides a mechanism to tap into the talent of our more than 160,000 employees. This will take our digital journey to the next level. With an increasing pool of consultants rapidly honing their skill sets by learning in a more natural, engaging way, Wipro is in a better position to increase its competitive advantage.
—Anurag Seth
Read the case study for more on how Wipro used Yammer to deploy its social learning program.