A former economist at the IMF, Véronique Bédague-Hamilius has held positions at Paris City Hall (Secretary General) and Matignon (Chief of Staff), and is now head of Nexity's Enterprise division. She initiated a user-centred strategic shift and set up the Nexity Enterprise Solutions platform. For this edition of Paris Workplace, she explains how she first tests the solutions internally, then offers them to her customers.
Véronique Bédague-Hamilius
What do customers talk to you about when they come to see you about a property project?
I always start by listening to my customer. Whatever company comes to see me, their first instinct is to tell me about their strategy, the DNA of their business and the transformation they are undergoing. Only then do we consider the real estate, economic and usage solutions. The office is the embodiment of the corporate culture. It embodies its atmosphere and management. It has to say who you are, what your values are and how you work. Office property is becoming a key competitive factor in a market. It is the signature. That's why we don't just work with the property department, but also with the HR department and the CEO.
The office is the embodiment of the corporate culture. It embodies its atmosphere and management.
How did you go about designing your own offices?
I always test the solutions I propose to our customers in-house. I'm firmly convinced that experience is part of the basis for solutions. For example, I believe that every company should have a central place, a 'village square'. At Nexity, we've set up a space on the 5th floor of our head office called 'le troquet'. It's our meeting place if we have a special event to celebrate, like a winning tender for example! Every month, we also organise a developers' talk on a strategic theme. These get-togethers help to unite the teams, take a step back and get some perspective. Employees have spontaneously taken to the site to improvise picnics. This is where we see if the workplace really conveys the corporate culture.
There is currently a debate on the flex office. At Nexity, you decided to take the plunge. After several months, what is your initial feedback?
There are flex and flex. In Nexity's commercial property development division, there are around sixty of us based in Paris, with some employees, particularly sales staff, who spend 40TP3T of their time in their office. Visit flex has an obvious economic rationale. But the idea is not to live on top of each other! We have a controlled environment: the assistants remain in fixed positions, because they organise things, they have a sort of "flagship" role; and we have created zones by job (developers, programming, editing, etc.) so that we can find each other more easily. We've also adapted the space to the way it's used. Depending on your needs, you can have a quieter or more open space, or choose dedicated areas to anchor your projects.
There was clearly a before and after. The flex frees employees from an "automatic" and hierarchical form of management. It empowers them and gives them a sense of responsibility, because it allows employees to meet and exchange ideas. My employees come up with new products and services, because there's more cross-fertilisation between the different business lines. The degree of innovation is greater and initiative is freed up.
But does that mean we should do away with the closed office altogether? I'm not sure. We need to be able to preserve certain moments of social life and sometimes regain some necessary privacy. For HR in particular, I think we need protected areas. It's not so much a question of square metres, but once again of usage! We have applied to ourselves what we want for our customers: to put the customer at the centre of our solutions!
