"Deskare is a single interface you can use directly from Teams to keep an eye on your week and that of your colleagues."

As is the case for many companies, the Covid-19 pandemic has turned working practices upside down at Eramet, the flagship of the French mining industry, present in some fifteen countries around the world.

With the spread of remote work, the company quickly found itself faced with organizational difficulties, due to a lack of visibility over the presence of employees in the offices. The Excel files that had been put in place soon proved insufficient, especially as they did not allow space to be reserved or historical attendance data to be easily analyzed.

Following a call for tenders, Eramet chose to deploy Deskare to facilitate the management of hybrid and flex office working, first at its Paris headquarters, then in its international offices in Indonesia and Norway.

Two years on, Claire Heinrich (Director of Compensation and Benefits) and Yoann Bourges (Digital Experience Manager in the IT Department) share their experiences with us: from deployment to day-to-day use, including the change management carried out to ensure employee adoption.

Deskare: a response to the new needs of a hybrid organization

While the introduction of hybrid working has been very well received by employees, it has also raised its share of challenges. Because when remote work becomes the norm rather than the exception, it' s hard to know who's in the office when.

A headache for both HR and the teams, for whom collaboration with their colleagues was becoming increasingly complex.

Every evening, before Deskare, we could hear over the open space, "Who'll be here tomorrow?" - ‍ClaireHeinrich

After having explored a home-made solution based on filling in Excel files to record everyone's attendance, the HR teams quickly realized that a dedicated solution was needed.

👉 See also: Which software should you use to enter your remote work ?

This need was all the more pressing as this new hybrid organization was followed by a switch to flex office, following an increase in staff numbers. On certain teams, the lack of workstations had become a problem: we needed to equip ourselves with a long-term tool that would also enable us to manage the reservation of workspaces.

The choice of a simple solution appreciated by employees

After testing an initial solution with poor ergonomics that failed to win over employees, Eramet's teams set out to find a new tool with a central criterion: user experience.

"If we don't manage to get employees on board with solutions that are appealing and easy to use, it usually results in failure." - Yoann Bourges

With its intuitive interface and its integration with everyday toolsDeskare perfectly met our expectations. The tool was immediately adopted by the teams, who not only found it pleasant to use, but also quickly understood its benefits.

No need to ask who'll be there tomorrow, or worry about the availability of workstations, Deskare provides visibility by making it easy to easily share attendance schedules and reserve workspaces. All directly from Microsoft Teamsthe internal communication tool used at Eramet.

Smooth deployment, thanks to a committed support team

Deployment of the solution went off without a hitch, with genuine "end-to-end support" from the Deskare teams, in the words of Yoann Bourges. This was done in several stages:

• Kick-off phase: participation in meetings with the IT Department to advise on the correct settings to adopt, based on the needs expressed by Human Resources and General Services;
• Technical support: assistance in integrating Deskare into the information system, in particular the HRIS and the company directory (Active Directory Azure);
• Change management: running training webinars, sharing teaching resources, and providing humorous communication tools to engage employees.

The aim is to get teams on board without adding to the workload of HR and internal communications!

"Deskare was a very simple tool to deploy. One indicator that illustrates this very well is the number of support feedbacks we received during the roll-out phase. Frankly, when it comes to requests to get to grips with the solution, we can probably count them on the fingers of one hand." - Yoann Bourges

Strong adoption by teams

Eramet employees immediately adopted the solution, and are still using it on a daily basis two years later: the usage rate is now over 90%!

"Very regularly, we come across employees who say to us: 'Me, Deskare, I love it, I'm sure I'll have a place. It's much easier to know who I'm going to be able to work with during the week, knowing who's there." - Claire Heinrich

The solution is particularly appreciated for its ease of use, a feedback that comes back very often, according to Claire Heinrich. With its "cheerful" interface, employees "enjoy using it", in her words!

Actionable data for reorganizing spaces

While Deskare was chosen to streamline the organization of hybrid work, the solution was also very useful for understanding how employees use the spaces.

In fact, by aggregating attendance and booking data into dashboards, it provides work environment teams with reliable data on office occupancy rates.

"We've finally managed to find out the occupancy rate at our Paris headquarters thanks to Deskare, since we didn't have this information before. We can see that we're between 50 and 60%, with tensions on certain teams that are close to 100%." - Claire Heinrich

As part of a space reorganization project, Eramet was able to use this data to objectively reallocate surface areas according to actual team usage.

"We now have objective data that has enabled us to make this reorganization in an intelligent way." - Claire Heinrich

If you too would like to make your teams' hybrid day-to-day activities more fluid and/or manage your flex-office organization efficiently with a solution designed with the user in mind, make an appointment with a member of our team !