EcoVadis has more than 1,500 employees spread across 13 offices on 4 continents. With dispersed teams, a flexible office setup, and a strong hybrid culture… the company faces a major challenge: standardizing the employee experience across the group, regardless of where people work.
It is in this context that the global leader in CSR ratings has replaced its flex office tool with Deskare, a solution that covers both flexible office management,the organization of the “ remote work,” and the collaborative challenges inherent in any hybrid work culture.
Julie Dorleac, who oversees the group’s overall employee experience, reviewed the various stages of this project, for which she served as the lead coordinator.
From the decision to challenge the status quo to the simultaneous rollout of Deskare across all 13 offices, she shares the inside story of this successful collaboration, which has achieved a nearly 90% employee satisfaction rate.
“Descare is a simple, intuitive, and visual flex-office solution that harmonizes the employee experience on a global scale while optimizing office occupancy.”
Julie Dorleac, Senior Associate, People Experience, EcoVadis
EcoVadis'sglobal presence has a profound impact on its internal organization.
Teams are not organized on a per-office basis; they are made up of employees located in several countries. Departments collaborate across sites, managers regularly oversee teams based in other locations, and each employee can work from another of the group’s offices for up to three months a year.
In this context, managing the employee experience requires a common global framework, with standardized processes and tools.
Reserve a workstation, share your availability schedule, organize an event with your team…Everything should be possible from a single platform for all employees across the group.
"No matter where an employee is located, they always use the same interface. This helps break down local barriers."
That said, every office has its own specific characteristics: floor plans, capacity limits, zoning rules… These are all factors that need to be adjustable at the local level—and simple enough for office managers to handle on their own.
The solution must therefore meet three requirements: provide a common framework for the group’s 13 offices, remain highly customizable to adapt to local constraints, and offer navigation that is fluid enough to be adopted by teams from different cultural backgrounds.
👉 See also: How Do Workplace Experience Platforms Help Companies Tackle the Challenge of the Employee Experience?
Before implementing Deskare, EcoVadis had already been using software to manage its offices for several years. It worked, but the teams’ feedback consistently highlighted several limitations.
The first, and undoubtedly the most important: the lack of fluidity in navigation. It took a lot of clicks to perform a simple action.
Added to this was the lack of integration with the HRIS, which meant employees had to enter their absences twice—in two separate systems. Another issue was the inability to schedule half-days, both when sharing the schedule and when reserving workstations. An employee arriving at 2:00 p.m. had to reserve a workstation for the entire day or not reserve one at all.
At the end of 2024, EcoVadis therefore decided to launch a comprehensive benchmarking process to find a solution better suited to its needs.
As project coordinator, Julie Dorleac brought together the office managers and the HR team to gather feedback from the front lines. From these discussions, one key criterion emerged: ease of use.
"We wanted a tool that was visually appealing, simple, intuitive, and required as few clicks as possible. An employee opens and reserves a workstation. It takes almost no clicks at all."
The requirements went beyond office management; they also included a collaborative aspect. EcoVadis was looking for a solution that would give managers greater visibility into their team’s presence and help them organize social and collaborative events.
"Our goal with this tool was to give managers complete autonomy: to provide them with a clear view of their teams' experience and to enable them to easily create opportunities for collaboration."
Finally, a more intangible criterion was present throughout the search process: the desire to find a service provider that genuinely seeks to understand their needs and is aligned with their work methods.
Following the market research, EcoVadis selected Deskare as its employee experience solution for all of its offices for three main reasons.
In addition to very smooth navigation, the platform offers a dynamic view of the floor plan, with the ability to create custom zones by department or noise level. This is a real benefit for employees, who can see at a glance which spaces are available based on their needs.
Simplicity and common sense are also evident in the analytical reports intended for administrators: the occupancy and attendance reports are clear and easy to read.
“I didn’t want a tool with too many reports or too many useless spreadsheets. We like it when things are simple: accurate analyses of occupancy trends, so we can make better use of our offices.”
Deskare met all the requirements outlined in the specifications: meeting room management, half-day reservations, the option of permanent “ remote work ” status for those who rarely come to the office, organization of team events, integrations with the HRIS, Google Calendar, and Slack…
Deskare was the only one of the solutions evaluated to offer a true managerial experience. The platform provides managers with a dedicated space containing all the information they need about their hybrid team: remote work schedules, upcoming absences, birthdays, attendance statistics, and more. A feature also allows themto organize team events with a single click, suggesting ideal dates based on shared schedules.
"In a multi-site environment where teams are spread out, Deskare doesn't just manage offices—it also fosters connections."
EcoVadis opted for a simultaneous rollout across its 13 offices. The project lasted six weeks, with a three-part governance structure proposed by Deskare and adopted as is.
The integrations with Workday, Azure AD, and Google Calendar were piloted by the technical teams at EcoVadis and Deskare in record time.
"It didn't even take an hour. We created a ticket between Deskare and IT, there was a call—I didn't even notice it happen. I've never seen IT respond so quickly."
Using a questionnaire covering all adjustable settings, the Deskare support team gathered all the information needed to configure the 13 workstations entirely on their own.
"Deskare set up our offices in the tool based on the information provided in the questionnaire. We didn't have to do a thing."
This step is undoubtedly the most challenging, as it involves getting all employees on board with adopting a tool they’ll use several times a week. Led by Julie along with the People Experience team and two representatives from the office managers, this phase benefited from support from Deskare, which provided a comprehensive operational framework. A ready-to-use kit—consisting of getting-started guides, a communication plan, and templates to be filled out—was supplemented by several live training sessions, scheduled to cover time zones from Japan to Mexico.
“Support was one of the major strengths of this project. Deskare provided us with a comprehensive, ready-to-use change management toolkit […] Our work mainly consisted of taking these materials and adapting them.”
The result? Deskare was immediately adopted by the 1,500+ employees, with a 97% usage rate (the remaining 3% were employees on full-time remote work or parental leave).
One year after its launch, an internal survey on the use of Deskare showed that 88% of users are satisfied with the solution, and that 95% are fully proficient with the software. Feedback from the survey highlights the tool’s ease of use and the improved employee experience made possible by its features.
Beyond employee satisfaction, Julie Dorleac has observed three major impacts since Deskare was implemented.
Deskare makes all office-related information accessible: everyone’s availability, available spaces, upcoming events… This is a major step forward for the People Experience team, one of whose goals for the year is to reduce the time spent on manual HR tasks by 25%.
"Our goal is to automate the most repetitive tasks so that we can focus on those that provide real added value, and so that employees can find the information they need as quickly as possible."
Thanks to the automatic reminders sent by Deskare, unnecessary reservations for meeting rooms or workstations can be canceled with a single click, making them available again to employees who need them. The occupancy reports available on the platform also help identify overbooked offices and inform decisions about how to adapt the workspace.
In addition to the logistical aspect, Deskare has helped strengthen collaboration and social bonds on a global scale. Managers are creating more and more team events, and employees are more motivated to come into the office, for the simple reason thatthey have access to the information that makes the office appealing: the people who are there and the events taking place.
"In a multi-site environment where teams are spread out, Deskare doesn't just manage offices—it also fosters connections."
For Julie Dorleac, Deskare isn't just a product. It's also a team of people who are attentive and responsive, there every step of the way during deployment and long afterward.
She sums up the collaboration in one sentence: “A simple, ultra-responsive, and incredibly effective collaboration, supported by turnkey assistance from their Customer Success team, which greatly facilitated our employees’ immediate adoption of the tool.”
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