Veolia Digital Workplace provides telecommuting for 20,000 French employees

The French group quickly adapted. From G Suite to Salesforce to ServiceNow, he already has SaaS applications suitable for remote work.

Veolia is a heavyweight in water and waste management in France, with 179,000 employees in 50 countries/regions and a turnover of 27.2 billion euros in 2019. In view of its positioning and scale, the status of operators in some business activities in France is crucial. When the containment measures began to spread to Europe (Europe is the largest part of its activities), the multinational company took action: organized rotations to ensure the health and safety of the field teams and established remote offices. For office workers. Of the 50,000 employees in France, 20,000 were affected. IT naturally plays a key role in this project. IT solutions already exist. Veolia can take advantage of a complete network of digital workplaces that have been deployed for a long time. The digital strategy is an exception to Cac 40, which was very reasonable when Covid-19 was held.

It must be said that Veolia has been committed to the SaaS strategy very early. Together with Essilor, Valeo or Solvay, it is one of the first groups in Cac 40 to deploy G Suite (formerly known as Google Apps). Google’s productivity suite was implemented globally in 2012 by the Paris-based company. Another SaaS brick is already in place, ServiceNow is Veolia’s benchmark platform for managing IT support. In addition to these two pillars, there is also a digital solutions store, which provides business units with a series of solutions that have been verified in terms of network security, compliance, and purchase policies. For example, it includes Salesforce CRM, which provides SaaS for Cisco Meraki network management, and also provides collaborative work tools such as Klaxoon or Smartsheet. It also includes business applications and services based on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud (two IaaS retained by Veolia).

Veolia CIO Didier Bove said: “As the remote office part of the group’s business continuity plan, we rely on the deployed products.” He mentioned G Suite and Service Cloud. The Veolia call center in France has installed the Salesforce SaaS customer service application for one year. Therefore, for call center employees who only need to connect to the Service Cloud web interface at home, the transition at home is transparent. In terms of access terminals, all employees at Veolia headquarters (that is, more than 2,500 employees) are equipped with Chromebooks and have the right to work remotely before the coronavirus crisis. Suddenly, Chromebooks have the privilege to face containment among other entities. For non-networked applications, VPN access is opened in parallel. “But these are exceptions.” Didier Bove insisted.

“Compared with the beginning of the year, Google Meet usage has increased by 500%, reaching thousands of meetings every day”

Since the start of containment, one of Veolia’s most popular G Suite bricks has been video conferencing. Didier Bove said: “Compared with the beginning of the year, Google Meet usage has increased by 500%, reaching thousands of meetings every day.” “Google Meet is no longer just used to replace face-to-face meetings. It is also used to connect Hundreds of employees send messages to real-time conferences.” Another tool that has been greatly improved: Klaxoon and its digital conference management platform.

At the same time, Veolia’s CIOs and CIOs in each geographic region are strengthening IT support actions to support remote workers for collaborative purposes related to distributed work configurations, while also providing network security education for the team, especially It is spam and phishing related to Covid-19. In order to answer employee questions on these topics, dedicated access points have been established.

Adjusted management

After three to four weeks of imprisonment, the group is taking the first lesson from long-term homework. Didier Bove admits: “Working for a few days a week or a day or a permanent job is very different. Given the feedback, we have to review our management methods in this area.” After defining the rules: Work remotely with everyone every day Employees make the least contact, need a break (by automatically entering the break time in the agenda), 55 minutes instead of an hour standard meeting to save time to beat. Didier Bove insisted: “The goal is to avoid tunnels and the sequence of tasks and meetings without interruption, and risk exhaustion.”

“This period of time shows that telecommuting is effective for individual or group activities”

As the group’s chief information officer, Didier Bove is clearly a stakeholder in Veolia’s daily crisis department set up on a global scale. A department composed of all functional departments of the headquarters. Due to geographical restrictions, the information messages defined by this organization are based on Lumapps and distributed through the Veolia intranet. For on-site workers who do not necessarily have access to e-mails, they are sent via SMS.

Meanwhile, Veolia’s ongoing digital project is continuing. “Our digital strategy is part of Veolia’s 2023 strategic plan. This is reflected in the desire to provide digital solutions in the SaaS model, and is also reflected in the development of solutions related to the CIO in each region in the concept. Global Digital Factory “, Didier Bove explained. In this case, a data lake has been deployed. Goal: Provide business teams with operational data and predictive machine learning models to optimize the performance of the water supply network and improve the energy efficiency of buildings or factories. , This is about developing new digital services.

When Veolia prepares to exit the containment phase, it remains to be seen whether telecommuting can be expanded afterwards. “This period shows that telecommuting is effective for personal or group activities, but when the number of speakers and interactions is too important, telecommuting is not so obvious. Didier Bove concluded “This is exposing oneself to weakening the social bonds between colleagues. We must find the right balance”.