Elior Chief Employment Officer Vincent Bohelay: “our human resources policy has always promoted and encouraged mobility”

VB Our human resources policy has always promoted and encouraged mobility. Many of our people work on secondment, and employees are redeployed to other areas of the business to cope with shortfalls in staffing. We’ve been using Andjaro for 3 years across several thousand French sites. This management platform analyzes the needs of each site and compares them with human resource availability to match supply with demand. It uses three parameters.

The first is location to ensure that employee travel times are roughly the same. Then comes expertise and skills for which we’ve developed a correspondence table so that a cook will be offered a vacancy requiring their cooking skills. Managers will be offered management posts. The final parameter is mobility between entities. Before the Covid-19 crisis, there was no mobility between the corporate and health catering sectors. Now that’s a definite possibility. Once a match has been made, the employee concerned receives details of their possible new assignment in a text message. If they accept, the validation process begins and the employee receives a detailed secondment agreement.

VB Many corporate and school catering sites closed during the first lockdown, so we had a lot of employees working part-time. But in health, demand was enormous. The only problem was that we hadn’t rolled out the system for that sector at that time. So we developed a new set of parameters to enable mobility in that direction. But no matter how sophisticated it may be, a system is still a system, so under these very special circumstances, the employees concerned were called personally. Job coordinators, HR managers and line managers were all involved in explaining the context of their new health sector missions to employees. In fact, we adapted very well, very quickly.

VB The current health crisis has absolutely demonstrated just how important it is. Of the 74,900 days of secondment arranged in 2020, 40% were organized by Andjaro. It’s a particularly effective solution in Paris and its surrounding region. That’s because with a thousand restaurants and several thousand employees concentrated here, Andjaro does an excellent job of optimizing travel times. The result is a very real gain in terms of time saved and higher efficiency.

During the health crisis, we’ve seen a great upsurge in solidarity and a real will to help each other, with everyone ready to respond to the needs of the health sector.

Vincent Bohelay, Chief Employment Officer

VB We’ve set up a volunteer database to complement employee reassignment. Many employees are leaving to discover other places and other missions. During the health crisis, we’ve seen a great upsurge in solidarity and a real will to help each other, with everyone ready to respond to the needs of the health sector. But corporate catering is very different from the catering environment of a residential care home. But once people overcame their initial reservations about working in a new environment, the feedback was very positive. That fact gives us great hope for the future of our long-term mobility policy.