Crèdit Agricole
Context
Crédit Agricole erected two new buildings in Parma requalifying the area of the old back office center “Cavagnari”. The new headquarters represented the opportunity to introduce New Ways of Working and new behaviours toward “client centricity”. The new buildings are characterized by open plan offices, several meeting rooms, informal working areas and a renewed canteen.
Objectives
The project aimed to support Crédit Agricole’s project team through the active participation in strategic meetings and the continuous involvement of Top Management.
Contents
To involve more than 1.500 employees in a big change toward new layout, new ways of working and new behaviours it was fundamental to apply Methodos’ Smart Working Model: Employee Journey Experience™.
We started from an innovative choice and we created a smart space where 70 pioneers from different organizational functions could test the new furniture and the smart ways of working in advance. Afterwards, 80 ambassadors were involved to facilitate the most and to support the working group in the testing phase or to collect feedback from the population. The key element to guarantee the success of the project was to make people understand the Activity Based Working practice, that is, being free to choose the workplace according to the activity to do. In this way, the office turned into a choice to make to and not an obligation any more.
There are many challenges to cope with in a journey like this one in Crédit Agricole, nevertheless the most important in order to succeed is the leaders’ change. They were called to go beyond the usual on control of the employees’ presence in the office, and to shift toward people management practices based on objectives definition, trust and empowerment.
Results
The project perfectly integrated all the change management levers applied to smart working (communication, training, HR policy, real estate, mobility management).
Its success has been the result of a choral effort by a team that worked steadiness on the project along all its phases.
The project represented a learning model for the organization in managing projects of such dimensions and topics. A key result, Green Life vaunts today the involvement and satisfaction of the population on the main drivers of the project, such as sustainability (in terms of lower consumption of paper), mobility (for example, accompanying people towards a more conscious use of different forms of sustainable mobility – car pooling), and in terms of guest/client experience.
