Experiencing the power of collaboration – The Chola Way

At “Chola” reaching the last mile employee was a challenge on a real time basis” says Shibu Unnithan- DGM HR in Chola. “Collaboration made it possible. With a large work force, spread across pan India, employee communication on a secure platform like Collaboration is an advantage over competition. AI HR chat bot, “Jinie” eased the query addressal mechanism and reduce the flow of basic query to HR team. In a nutshell Collaboration is a big leap in employee connect and surely a game changer

Experiencing the power of collaboration – The Chola Way

How Chola use Collaboration to connect 27,000 employees across India 100+ locations

Cholamandalam Investment and Finance Company Limited is also known as Chola is a part of a long-lasting legacy called Murugappa Group and is the financial service arm of the behemoth which is more than 100 years old.

Chola started off as an equipment financing company and as of today, it is one of the most comprehensive financial service providers offering vehicle finance, home loans, home equity loans, SME loans and many other financial services to customers.

They have an ever-growing clientele of over 800,000 happy customers across the nation

The need for collaboration

With a total of more than 27,000 employees and more, it’s not an easy task for an institution to reach out to every employee present in the company.

The dispersed and segregated workforce present in the organization made it almost impossible for the management to convey the right message to the right people at the right time.

Most of the employees in the company were not reachable over a single outreach attempt.

And on top of that, the major part of the workforce did not have any email ID, making access to new information almost impossible.

Made worse by the fact that the entire frontline workers which constitute more than 80% of the workforce are scattered across the nation

In search of a solution

Management came to a mutual conclusion that to increase overall productivity they need to increase internal communication.

This will enable different silos within the company interact and share information with each other, making sure that those conversations are being heard by rest of the workforce.
They started evaluating different social media platforms for corporate communication which could not only help with workplace collaboration and increase employee engagement but also was secure and reliable.

Various platforms were evaluated wherein employees could interact without any restrictions and was available on the go, such as:

1.Yammer

2.FB social media

3.Whatsapp

4.Collaboration

5.Success factors

6.Oracle fusion

7.Ramco

Chola decided to go with Collaboration after several rounds of deliberation.

Right technology, right collaboration

Chola started arming it’s frontline workforce by anchoring in the adoption of Collaboration, an intelligent workplace collaboration platform by PeopleStrong which required nothing but a phone number or an employee ID to sign up.

Chola recognized that this new approach could solve most of their prevailing problems by providing solutions like:

1.Collaboration groups allowed anyone from the organization to form a goal-oriented group, where any number of members can be added instantly and have seamless context-oriented conversations using conversational threads.

2.Management could micro-manage their distributed workforce by assigning task and monitoring their activities using Collaboration.

3.Cross functional as well as guest like freelancers, vendor partners, customers could be added in the groups without compromising the sensitive data

4.Employee engagement functions like Quick Polls, Appreciations, Message Tagging , File Sharing, Threaded messages elevated the employee interaction level within the organization

The shifting culture

It didn’t take long for the scattered workforce to pick up Collaboration as their default workplace conversation platform. By the first few weeks of their official onboarding and integration timeline, the active installs rose to 41% of the total workforce, totalling to 11,000 employees, which was tremendous for any enterprise app. The adoption increased and is still increasing every single week and more and more happy users bringing their peers and colleagues into the platform. As they say, user is the king, the ease with which an employee today can connect and collaborate contextually at work helped a lot in creating this success story. Chola’s story is a unique one, where a traditional enterprise brought the user experience at the center and strived to create a #NewCodeofWork success story!