It's often thought that flexible working, working hours and innovation on subjects relating to the "future of work" are reserved for the American tech giants... But wrongly so.
Our meeting with SARETEC - France's leading claims management company - proved that we were definitely wrong, and that the most innovative companies are sometimes not the ones you might think!
Founded in 1977, Saretec today employs a workforce of 2,000, divided between a head office near Paris (in Créteil) and a network of 80 agencies throughout France and overseas. The group is also expanding in Spain.
We met with Elodie Bonnet, HR Development Manager, and Sébastien Laumond, Communications Manager, and simply asked them this question: "How have you changed the organization of work, at Saretec, since the Covid crisis?"
As is the case for many companies, Saretec took advantage of the Covid crisis to adopt a more flexible work organization, both on site and remotely; an organization enabling employees to enjoy a better work/life balance. In the words of Elodie Bonnet, the period of confinement was "a gas pedal". The transformation quickly proved positive, both in terms of employee satisfaction and company performance.
"A lot of the work had been done upstream, with the deployment of a fleet of laptops, the implementation of an initial rider linked to remote work, and a lot of training and awareness-raising on remote working for our employees," explains Elodie Bonnet.
Since then, Saretec has continued to innovate in the field of hybrid work organization, with a clear aim: to bring greater fulfillment to every employee.
While Saretec's approach is tailored to the specific needs of the company and its businesses, there are four lessons that any employer can draw from it to effectively move towards greater flexibility in the organization of work, whatever their structure.
As Saretec is a company with a vast geographical network of 2,000 employees in over 80 different offices, setting up an approach based on dialogue and listening can be quite complex. However, according to Elodie Bonnet, "it's a sine qua non if an innovation or change is to produce good results".
"We set up a proactive approach to exchanges between the different agencies," she points out; the CSE and the human resources department got involved to understand how each agency was experiencing hybrid working and organizing itself, and how we could better help them."
The HR department endeavored to gather as much feedback as possible from the various teams. To achieve this, it relied on qualitative and quantitative questionnaires and site visits, taking care to establish a climate of trust.
This discussion phase identified two major expectations among Saretec employees: greater workplace flexibility (facilitating the implementation of "hybrid working" in particular), and a strengthening of social ties and conviviality despite the distance.
The second lesson concerns the uniqueness of each team. As Sébastien Laumond points out, "each team, via its manager, operates differently, with its own rituals and culture: this diversity is a strength that must not be broken".
According to Saretec, HR management must provide a guideline for flexibility in the workplace, but each manager must remain free to adapt the way he or she works to the team. Generally speaking, employees have a great deal of autonomy to organize themselves within a team: an autonomy encouraged by managers.
For their part, these employees are regularly trained by the company to lead and manage their team optimally, even in remote work or in a "hybrid mix".
In addition to these training courses, the management team allocates each manager a "conviviality budget" to maintain links with his or her team in hybrid mode, on a personalized basis:
"The idea is to follow employees' wishes to create a good collective memory" explains Sébastien Laumond. "The communications team got together to listen to a Jazz concert, while the HR team organized a dinner at a crêperie: adaptability is key!".
For Elodie Bonnet, simply "copying and pasting" a culture or organization from elsewhere is always doomed to failure. Any organizational change must be preceded by an internal dialogue to understand what employees and managers really want in terms of flexibility at work.
In addition, we must not hesitate to test new formulas, to experiment with employees on the subject of flexibility. Saretec's gradual transition to a flex desk is a good illustration of this. Initially, a test was carried out using a zoning where each employee could sit where he or she wished, in a zone defined for his or her team. The idea was to set up zones for each team, and then evaluate the performance of this system before considering a switch to full flex office.
Saretec has not stopped at the flex office to energize office life. Several pilot projects have been tested and deployed, such as the "vis mon job" scheme, which enables employees who so wish to move from one branch to another, or to live with a colleague for a few days to gain a better understanding of all the jobs involved.
➡️ See also: how Grohe made the concept of vis ma vie a reality
Last but not least, any innovation in work organization generally requires a technological innovation to match the stated ambition.
Saretec has implemented a fleet of laptops and the Office 365 suite with Microsoft Teams. This now makes everyday life easier for all employees. A new intranet has also been deployed to encourage exchanges between employees and cross-functional communication.
To provide all our teams with a clear overview, we have developed an in-house solution enabling everyone to enter their remote work days for the coming months. This enables everyone to know "who's coming when" and "who's where", so they can better plan their week and be in the right place at the right time. This is an important step towards better office organization and conviviality.
Other companies have experienced or are still experiencing the same problems as Saretec. Some have also begun to organize flexibility in the office with an "in-house solution", using Excel for example. The most innovative, however, have turned to turnkey solutions.
In short, many French companies still think it's too early to bring more flexibility to the workplace and fully embrace the "future of work". Saretec and its HR team are, on the contrary, convinced of the need to move forward on these subjects today to promote real employee fulfillment. Elodie Bonnet and Sébastien Laumond are the driving force behind an approach based on exchange and trust between all teams, showing us that HR innovation is within everyone's reach, and that technology is a real ally!
To find out more, discover how a well-managed hybrid policy optimizes office space and generates real cost savings for the company thanks to flex office.
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