Céline Laurenceau is a Managing Director at Accenture, in charge of HR and organisation. She is the Go-to-market Lead for France at Fjord, the global network of innovation and design studios acquired in 2013. She explains Accenture's organisational strategy and the impact of office layout on creative professions.
Céline Laurenceau
Accenture was a pioneer in teleworking and digital transformation. Has more digital technology meant fewer face-to-face relationships for you?
It's true that we were among the first to sign the teleworking agreement. Today, more than a third of our employees, excluding consultants, have signed up to it. But we have found that the more we digitalise, the more we need to socialise. We have 80 % of our workforce under the age of 30, essentially made up of a nomadic population (due to the consultancy professions). Our challenge is to succeed in creating a sense of commitment and belonging, even though we spend most of our time at the customer's premises.
The office for consultants is central. Both literally and figuratively:
- Exactly: they have to be easily accessible. When we moved our Paris offices, for example, we deliberately chose to set up in the 13th arrondissement, at the foot of metro line 14.
- Figuratively speaking: the office is the place to socialise par excellence, the place where consultants can meet up. For example, we have employees who come back for lunch and then go back to the client.
How does a large group like yours, with a wide range of professions, manage the right to disconnect?
We have introduced a rule and a technical device: after 8.00 pm, if you send a message, you receive an alert. The under-35s want to mix their work time with their personal time. They are not clear on the subject of disconnection. It's a complex issue: we need rules that are prescriptive, but flexible enough to adapt to different populations.
As we have acquired several companies like Fjord, we also have populations with different relationships to time. A lot of designers, for example, come from freelance backgrounds. As a result, I have someone with a rock band who would like to work part-time, 15 days on, 15 days off. At the same time, this is a population that can't stand multitasking. You can't disturb a designer when he's concentrating on one subject. Traditional consultants, on the other hand, are more able to switch around and have a more traditional relationship with their schedule.
Fjord is Accenture's design studio. How are workspaces designed for creative professions?
We are organised into 5 major zones. First you have a 'craft' space for prototyping, then a collaborative space where employees, customers or partners can come and work freely. Then there's the communal kitchen area, where the team has breakfast every Friday morning. Only then do you have the open space, where everyone has their own workstation, and the "project" rooms, each dedicated to one of the missions we're working on.
Symbolically, the layout of these spaces is important: you enter a space that is open to our stakeholders, then you have the place for meetings and exchanges, the place par excellence where the corporate culture is forged. And finally, there are the workspaces. Work doesn't come second, but it shows (and brings to life) the importance we attach to relationships. Similarly, we've been careful not to compartmentalise all our offices: a room that's physically open is also intellectually open and generous. For creative people, being together is fundamental. It's the very condition of their creativity, based on exchange and prototyping.
Karim Zaouai, Design Lead, Fjord Paris
Designer (space design).
Karim Zaouai
Design Thinking adapted to real estate
Design is an applied art, linked to industry in the broadest sense (organisation, product creation, etc.). In this approach, as soon as we think about an object, whether it's a stool or an application, we also think about its deployment/production. Design schools, for example, are often funded by the Ministry of Culture (it's an art) and the Ministry of Industry (it's an applied art).
Traditionally, we start with the brief given by the client, from which we make recommendations. In design, we start with the users. We'll see whether the issues raised in the brief correspond to the real needs encountered by the users (in commercial property, this will be the employees themselves). In order: first we carry out a "field" phase (observation of users in real-life situations), then an "ideation" phase (collective intelligence), and finally we prototype the product.
More specifically, we designed the offices of one of the Middle East's leading telecommunications companies to make their spaces modular. Clients had to be able to come and go, and the partitions had to be removable. We also worked for a call centre where the organisation of physical space was a real issue. Today, when you phone a call centre with a question and the person you're speaking to doesn't have the answer, they have to get out of their office to find their boss. That's why you often have to wait a long time. We've changed the office space so that managers have a more central position. To test the solution, we used virtual reality, which enabled the employees to project themselves and us to adjust the layout of the space.
