Marie LEMESLE
Recruitment and Employer Brand Manager
In line with the structural evolution of the school and its new dimensional design, the main objectives of the Human Resources Department are to renew its tools, presence and support in keeping with the challenges faced by each department, with a leitmotiv underpinning it all: returning to certain fundamentals and ensuring the working environment remains as stimulating and fulfilling as ever for everyone.
Delphine LAMBERT
Director of Human Resources
500
The number of employees at Audencia as of late 2023.
How would you assess 2023?
As far as the Human Resources Department is concerned, the picture is obviously mixed. We had to adapt to a particularly changing and challenging environment due to various internal and external factors. Nevertheless, 2023 enabled us to move forward and even put into practice a number of important, cross-functional initiatives that address a variety of issues: ever stronger gender equality in the workplace, introduction of a system of voluntary “Listening & Prevention” advisors to facilitate reporting of certain delicate situations in-house and provide better support, changes to the annual appraisal process, development of our different campuses, both in Paris and abroad, the recruitment required to develop our activities, and support for organizational changes. 2023 allowed us to pass the milestone of 500 employees, which required a structural change and, more generally, a rethink of all our systems to improve the fluidity and harmonization of inter-department practices.
What are the CSR commitments that guide your actions?
CSR at Audencia is something that everybody is involved in. accordingly, we work closely with the CSR delegation, since we have a role to play in supporting all these initiatives and encouraging commitment. This last year witnessed the launch of several joint projects: the ethics charter, the Listening & Prevention scheme and generalization of VSS training, for managers and employees. At the same time, we are working on social aspects to continue offering a rich environment and preserving the balance that has seen, in particular, the introduction of the extra 10-day remote working scheme in addition to the framework agreement already in place for several years, or also salary maintenance for employees obliged to take leave to care for family members. If we were to look ahead, we are already working on integrating CSR and ecological dimensions into our value proposition, in order to ensure that our collective behavior is in keeping with these values, drawn from a generic knowledge base.
What are your objectives for 2024?
Three major projects will punctuate 2024, with firstly, the resizing of our HR management tools and in particular our HR/payroll IS, which is no longer adapted to our structure. This project will not only enable us to make better use of our data but also to relieve the workload of our teams. The second major project is the job and career management project. To achieve this, we are going to take a fresh look at our professions in the light of contextual developments (linked to ecological transition or artificial intelligence in particular) so that we can continue to provide support for tomorrow’s skills. The idea is to achieve better identification of internal pathways (as part of the development project). Finally, in 2024, we will have to make our salary policy ever more competitive to meet our recruitment needs and attract the best talent to our campuses in France and abroad. Through this approach, we aim to offer measures that are increasingly adapted to employees and their expectations and needs.
What is the one word that defines the strategic direction of your actions between now and the end of the ECOS 2025 strategic plan?
I would say “Preserving”: preserving a focus on human capital despite certain budgetary constraints and, wherever possible, improving existing measures to offer an increasingly more balanced working environment. Our challenge will be to turn certain constraints into opportunities for our shared future. A major thrust will also be to return to specific fundamentals, by renewing a certain togetherness and proximity, especially where manager/employee appraisals are concerned.
Who better to talk about Audencia than the employees?
“In 2023, Audencia enabled all its stakeholders to meet the people who make up the company.
The Human Resources Division and the Communications Division worked in close collaboration to reveal the vital role of each individual and the strong values that drive our teams.
In particular, employees were given the opportunity to express themselves through a collection of 12 video portraits, combining aspects of their professional and personal lives, illustrating the richness of the Audencia team. These portraits were promoted in-house and have been added to the monthly portraits posted on the intranet to present the life stories of the men and women who work for the school on a daily basis. The external stakeholders were also able to discover these portraits on the social networks and via new recruitment tools that have been implemented.
Audencia has been committed to a CSR approach for many years and we are committed to contributing to this collective vision by communicating to our external stakeholders about our social environment. We are committed to communicating with applicants and employees in a transparent way. We take particular care to ensure that our messages do not include any form of discrimination or self-censorship.
And what about tomorrow? Our challenge will be to continue to promote our employer brand, both internally and externally, in order to highlight the hallmarks of the Audencia work culture and environment to future applicants and employees.”
