How to manage your teams by teleworking with Engie?

Serge Martin, Managing Director of Customer-Relations Centres at ENGIE France B2C, General Public Division, confides the best practices and insights that help him manage his telework teams successfully.

The many challenges that companies have had to meet during lockdown included emergency implementation of telework. Although a few of them were already relatively familiar with the system, most of them had to demonstrate extraordinary proactiveness along with resilience and agility in a context as unprecedented as it was uncertain. 

Now, after several months of practice and with its organisation finally established, we’ve taken the time to have another look at the notion of distance management, proficiency in which is essential to the system’s proper operation and optimisation of the employee experience.

What best practices should be communicated to management teams to ensure that they continue to take good care of their teleworking employees? What tools can be used to help compensate for the loss of teams’ social ties? What are the opportunities and risks of remote work as far as companies are concerned? We broached this broad subject with ENGIE Grand Public, which has been a partner of ours since 2006, asking Serge Martin what he had to say about it.

In March 2020, several hundred advisors and managers were switched to telework in-house as well as in your outsourced Customer Relations Centres. What were your priorities in giving thought to and implementing the system?

Serge Martin: It’s important to remember that telework was implemented in March as an emergency measure after the country was first locked down due to the health situation, not by choice; so it’s really crisis telework – the same crisis we’re still in today. In this context, we drew on our internal organisation, with our 3 ENGIE CRCs in France, as well as on our external partners, who provide us with support in several destinations.

In mid-March 2020, we managed this new situation with 2 priorities in mind: the health of all our employees and partners via strict compliance with health measures, and implementation of our business continuity plan, which had been developed upstream of the lockdown, in order to maintain high levels of service quality for our clients and prospects.

A number of conditions had to be met in to order ensure successful implementation of telework among our partners’ customer advisors, including IT developments to safeguard our clients’ personal data (such as their IBANs). Once the system was perfected and made available to our partners, we left it entirely up to them to manage their respective activities in line with their own infrastructures and constraints, and the activities they managed.

Armatis’ teams outdid themselves during this period in order to meet your customers’ needs while safeguarding our employees’ health. What’s your assessment of this period in our partnership?

Serge Martin: We tackled the crisis with good partnership relations and in a climate of mutual trust. Each party took full account of the difficulties encountered by the other, listening to each other and discussing matters. So we succeeded in keeping up a very close relationship on a daily basis, as regards operational and sales teams and your executive management alike.

In this context, Armatis was able to implement telework for our activities. We also both agreed that there were gains in productivity, with employees generally satisfied with their working conditions according to the surveys conducted by Armatis. In terms of quality, and customer satisfaction and experience, scores were also positively impacted by the system; and our customers expressed their appreciation of our continued presence at their sides despite the context.

One of the major challenges posed by telework is team management. Overseeing performances, individual monitoring and communication all had to be totally reinvented. In your opinion, what are the best practices that have been deployed?

Serge Martin: Management is certainly one of the activities most impacted by telework, in particular in the customer relations sector.

Each employee has their own way of operating, depending on their seniority; expertise, personality and ambition, which means that managers must have increased knowledge of their teams. Distance makes detection of weak signals (of mood and emotions) more complex. Management teams had to demonstrate even more empathy than usual; all the more so as all of us, whatever our level, have experienced the stages of lockdown differently.

Also, with a view to best mitigating the risks of isolation and loss of social links, we implemented a number of solutions at ENGIE Grand Public:

• First of all, during the 1^st lockdown, we conducted weekly flash surveys by email in order to collect general indicators of morale, wellbeing, work/life balance and level and quality of exchanges with colleagues and managers. The surveys were appreciated and enabled us to monitor our employees, and we used them again during the 2^nd lockdown.  
• Next, we organised webinars at BU France B2C, so that all employees would have the same levels of information on what was happening and how the various activities were going.
• Finally, we made sure of maintaining regular managerial rituals via the Windows Teams tool, both individual, enabling each participant to express their feelings, doubts and misgivings, and collective, in order to maintain team spirit, cohesion and a sense of sharing.

Our advisors at Armatis were also able to make use of an internal tool, “SODA”, a digital solution that had already been deployed before the crisis and which enabled them to obtain information on their activity and performance and company news in real time, and to keep in contact with their colleagues and managers.

Deployment of remote work initially gave rise to debate in French institutions. Its large-scale application has nonetheless enabled many employers to demystify the system and speed up their companies’ transformation. In your opinion, what are the opportunities and risks of remote work?

Serge Martin: In my view, the two essential pillars of remote work are trust and empowerment. Telework acts like a sieve: you only see the performance, not the way the work is carried out. In this regard, the challenge is to set SMART goals, tailored to each employee and the context of their activity, designed to ensure their wellbeing while maintaining a quality of service similar to that obtained onsite.

Of course, there are technical and logistical prerequisites for remote work. Apart from Internet connection and a good work environment, we made sure, among other things, that tools were fully secure as far as customer data was concerned. Employees’ levels of competence, expertise and self-reliance also have to be taken into account so as to make sure that they’ll be in the best position to carry out their missions successfully. 

With This experience under your belt, how do you imagine the Contact Centres of tomorrow’s world will operate?

Serge Martin: We’re already giving thought to the post-crisis mode of organisation. How will are teams be working tomorrow? Although nothing has yet been decided as to “tomorrow’s” target work organisation, the crisis has profoundly modified our modes of operations and I’m sure there’ll be a great many lessons to be drawn from it, both in terms of agility and organisation between professional life and personal life.  

There’s certainly a “right balance” to find between remote work and work carried out face-to-face, onsite. With a view to finding the best in both systems in terms of management, improvement of teams’ skills, maintenance of social ties, individual relations with managers, emulation, and pride in belonging. Real food for thought!

Last word…

Serge Martin: I’d like to thank Armatis and its teams most sincerely, as well as all our partners, for their support in the atypical context of the health crisis that we’ve been living through for several months now.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank all my teams at the internal Customer Relations Centres and our support functions, for their untiring involvement and agility at the service of our customers and prospects!