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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.

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Project background

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.

The solution

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. 


Results

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.

Rolling out the program
 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
Coaching activity at Campus Veolia who now offers to facilitate these days with her colleague, is delighted to contribute and help people do things differently. “It’s rewarding to be part of the development of people and teams!” she said.
 
Because the Veolia Group is located all over the world, the choice of a multicultural assessment offering a common language was decisive. Today the training program is deployed in countries in Central Europe and in the United States, and more than 300 people have already benefited from this training since 2017.
 
In the meantime, another program-based accompaniment has been developed and designed for women. ‘Women in Leadership’ aims to identify women’s talents and develop them to the fullest. Three promotions have already taken place.
 
The aim now is to support the deployment of these seminars by certifying other in-house consultants so they can administer the MBTI assessment. Veolia also plans to create a monitoring module to identify what has been put in place and allow participants to continue building on the initial gains.