Campus Veolia
Accelerating collaboration within teams
Operating in five continents with more than 171,000 employees, the Veolia Group designs and deploys solutions for water, waste and energy management, which contribute to the sustainable development of cities and industries.
In 2018, the Veolia Group served 95 million people with drinking water and 63 million with sanitation. It produced nearly 56 million megawatt hours of energy and converted 49 million tons of waste into new materials and energy.
Through its three complementary activities, Veolia is helping to preserve and renew resources while increasing accessibility to them. How can it develop its people, many of whom work in different countries, so they work effectively and complement each other too?
Convinced that individual development has a direct impact on the performance of teams, the Innovation and Marketing directorate of the Veolia Group launched a program of seminars in its Paris office.
It was an opportunity to focus on both self-discovery and collaboration so that teams could get to know each other and work better together.
Because the MBTI® assessment was already used in-house at Veolia for different purposes, it was used for these seminars too. Dinah Louda, an advisor to the CEO and an MBTI practitioner herself, was key to getting the program moving.
Coaches from Veolia co-created and co-hosted the program with our consultants in 2017. The program was then delivered by Campus Veolia and the one-day seminars have continued to run ever since.
Seminar benefits
First, the event allows team members to take a step back from themselves and think about their mode of interaction. It gives people a chance to step away from professional daily life. It creates some time for people to discover themselves. Participants appreciate it as a special moment.
Second, it offers people the key to understanding themselves and encourages a better understanding of each other’s dynamics. This allows them to find individual and collective actions to overcome misunderstandings, develop collaboration, improve communication and search for solutions.
While some participants were already familiar with the MBTI assessment, others were sometimes sceptical, thinking it would ‘put them in boxes’. However, the seminar removed the doubts with one participant commenting, “I understand better why my colleague reacts this way.”
The MBTI assessment was perceived as interesting, non-intrusive and positive. The group used self-awareness to find solutions that work for everyone to improve communication and collaboration (doing things differently in meetings, soliciting the manager sooner, or asking questions at a different time, for example). The revelation to this team was that the manager had a preference for Introversion while the 10 people in the team all had preferences for Extraversion.
The enthusiasm is such that this training program has been requested by other branches (HR, Risks and Insurance, Energy France). Estelle Lucas, Head of Individual Support, Collective and Internal