Innovorder was pleased to host its meetup dedicated to engagement in the context of hypergrowth.
Animated by Ludovic Girodon, analyst at Réseau EntreprendreThe meeting was divided into three main parts and provided an opportunity to hear the experiences and perspectives of experts with complementary profiles:
- Talk 1: Engage your employees from the recruitment process, by Camille FauranCOO at Welcome to the Jungle.
- Talk 2 : Invest in personal development and commitment to make your teams grow, with Arnaud VarnierCEO of Windoo.
- A roundtable discussion on the theme "How to make engagement the engine of hypergrowth?" with Matthieu Birach (Chief People Officer at Doctolib), Pierre Mottais (Culture manager at Back Market) and Jérôme VarnierCEO of Innovorder.
How do they experience employee engagement and hypergrowth on a daily basis? How can we make the recruitment process and onboarding a real driver of engagement?
To see or rewatch the event, it is here :
How to engage your employees from the recruitment process
"Investing in onboarding is about creating loyalty" - Camille Fauran, COO of Welcome to the Jungle
For Camille, it is essential to rethink the relationship between recruiter and candidate. "We are convinced that the candidate must be considered as a client. We should not 'sell' a job blindly. It's not just a job, it's a project to join".
Recruitment and engagement are intimately linked. At Welcome to the Jungle, for example, all applicants for a position receive a response, whether negative or positive. Thereafter, the recruitment process is communicated regularly, with feedback at every stage of the process and the CEO present for the final round.
Another fundamental point is the employee onboarding process. "We think that all the work is done when the person is recruited, but that's just the beginning. After the seduction phase, there is nothing worse than for the candidate to discover in the first few days that this is not what they were sold".
At Welcome to the Jungle, the entire process lasts a month to fully understand the business and multiply the number of immersions. With one particularity: there is no scale of value in the integration of a person. One of the keys to success is to put the same energy into onboarding an intern as you would into onboarding a C-level!
Scaling an onboarding without losing quality is :
- Formalize the process
- Make it dynamic
- ... and be convinced of its effectiveness!
It is also a dynamic process: all newcomers answer a questionnaire, not only at 1 month but during the whole trial period. This feedback is valuable. "The buddy system, for example, I personally didn't see the point... but several people have told me that they don't dare go out for a drink after work, etc. That motivated me and we implemented it.That motivated me and we put it in place."
What to put in the onboarding? "What is characteristic of us and not obvious to transmit". With one idea in mind: to avoid creating silos through lack of knowledge.
Invest in personal development and commitment to grow your teams
"A company is also the sum of the people who make it up" - Arnaud Varnier, CEO of Windoo
Windoo in a few figures, it is nearly 150 customers, more than 1000 workshops per month, 40000 employees reached and a network of 4000 contributors in France and Benelux.
Windoo works on the ability of a company to attract, motivate and retain the best talents, through activity programs and with the conviction that engaged employees make companies more relevant: "in a context of hypergrowth, people are everything".
Based on the pyramid of needs, the main pillars of motivation are survival, security, belonging, recognition and esteem. These last three steps are fundamental in a company, untilself-fulfillment. Employees who achieve this become ambassadors and inspire the rest of the team.
How do we measure this commitment? There is no simple answer. The important thing is to create a virtuous action loop: listen, act, measure.
Some indicators such as theeNPS allow for this, but also other KPIs that can be monitored: turnover, the number of voluntary departures, etc. The difficulty is to use this data to develop an action plan. The challenge is to use this data to develop an action plan. "It isoften necessary to learn how to create feedback, to understand the organizational issues that can be acted upon and to energize the life of the office".
Among Windoo's hypergrowth clients, certain patterns are recurrent. "The company is also the sum of the people who make it up. How do we manage to maintain this culture in hypergrowth? What are the issues around these young employees who find themselves propelled to managerial positions? How do we integrate the new ones?"
The new generation of Millenials also brings its share of questions, especially in the context of beautiful scale-ups where the majority of employees are under 30 years old.
New expectations, need for fulfillment, redistribution of the hierarchy of values... after the question of salary, it is the development of soft skills that prevails - in particular those related to relational skills and innovation.
Round Table: How to make engagement the engine of hypergrowth?
The main challenges in a hypergrowth phase: scaling, reinventing... without losing your identity
Jérôme: this is a current theme for us, with the transition from the bootstrapping phase (a few people in the same room) where we know everyone very well, including customers and suppliers, to the scaling stage, which involves hundreds or even thousands of customers, the need to manage arrivals well...
The main challenge is how to create a framework that is robust enough to absorb these rapid transformations in a hyper-growth phase. What was true 3 months ago is no longer true. We need to maintain focus, clarity and team commitment, but remain flexible enough to preserve our start-up agility. Our customers come to Innovorder for this responsiveness. The challenge is to find the right balance between framework and flexibility.
Matthieu: How do you manage to reinvent yourself each time, while maintaining a form of unity in terms of DNA and culture? As for the subject of onboarding, for example, the size of the company means that we have to industrialize a certain number of processes. The good fortune of today's companies is that there is much more published on these subjects today than there was even 3 or 4 years ago.
How do you engage everyone, especially when the teams are far apart?
Pierre : Our question was, "How do we integrate everyone when Back Market is in Paris, Bordeaux, etc.? We have set up rituals, aperitifs, regular DIY activities, sports thanks to Windoo... we also try to make it easy for people to travel from one office to another. We are also very committed to the ecological part, via compost workshops, the choice of a short circuit beer... and always a touch of madness in our events, to surprise our teams!
Matthieu: at Doctolib, we have two countries, France and Germany... and many cities with a remote work logic. There are many answers, but one point is fundamental: the step from one country to two is enormous and often underestimated. My only advice is to prepare it well and not to underestimate the big difference it will cause for the people, the organization and the culture. On another level, hiring is a sum of decisions. You have to challenge what you have in mind as a culture and what you really do on a day-to-day basis.
Jérôme: At Innovorder, we quickly realized that our success would depend on our ability to attract, retain and develop talent in a highly competitive environment. This involves training workshops, personal development, etc. We have always kept this at the heart of our DNA. The recruitment process is designed to be as engaging as possible and is seen as a two-way street: we are there to evaluate the candidate, but another aspect is to give him/her all the keys to evaluate us. He will make a choice that we want to be enlightened, and his first day must correspond to what he expected. To do this, it is important to give as much context as possible to the person who is going to join us.
In the end, what is an engaged employee?
Pierre: he's a happy employee who wakes up in the morning and arrives very happy to join the team. At Back Market, we measure him with SupermoodI'm fighting to ensure that we can communicate regularly with each other. I'm fighting for regular face-to-face communication. Slack and email are great, but daily life is super important... Likewise, the work environment makes a difference!
