Santé, sécurité et bien-être au travail - Laetitia de Montgolfier Directrice RH - Lidl France

Hello Chloé, thank you for the invitation.

Effectively, with a couple of details in between, but that's it, thank you.

We were just talking about what might be interesting, or what I might not have said. The question and surprise was: why a startup after large corporations? In my last role at Amazon, I spent almost 2 years fully virtual between India and the US, with very high-level contacts in HR strategy. I needed to get back to very hands-on, very operational work, so I joined a scale-up that was already somewhat large, to completely overhaul the HR processes—I even created some from scratch—and build the strategy with the HR team. So really having the full scope with my hands in the nitty-gritty. That's what I like: to feel your contribution, your added value directly with employees. I am passionate about HR and I need to see and feel it.

The challenges are multiple. Obviously, it's to support the company and its development in service of customers, so that is really our major challenge. This involves, notably, our attractiveness as an employer, with our current employees: how do we ensure they feel as good as possible in the company, and how do we attract new candidates? Next, how do we continue to work on the development of our teams? We have a very strong footprint in HR development: 90% of our managers come from internal promotions. So for us, that's part of our operating model. It's about continuing to make that work and ensuring each employee feels fulfilled with this development policy. And it's about continuing to work with our social partners on our disability policy, on the many agreements we negotiate. For example, we work with our social partners on supporting our older employees. These are strong challenges, both for the company and for society. So we need to be at the forefront of all these topics. We have four pillars: taking care (health and safety), giving a chance (recruitment without prerequisite of diploma or experience, supporting development, apprenticeship with over 1,000 apprentices and over 6,000 students working for Lidl on permanent contracts), accompanying and developing (investing in training so everyone can develop), and developing pride and recognition.

This topic drives me because it is the foundation. In fact, health and safety at work: I would like to live in a world where work is good for health. That would be my credo: I come to work because it is beneficial for my health and I feel good there.

My convictions are that safety must obviously be a priority for everyone, especially managers, but not only—for every person working in the company. It must be a priority. We must not make any decision that has a negative impact on safety. That's the basics. Then, safety culture develops. That means being able to talk about safety regularly, making it part of our daily life, and making sure that respect for rules in a prevention logic is part of a positive feedback dynamic: saying 'great, you respected this rule' or 'you maintained distances between forklifts', 'you used this equipment for stocking shelves'. Being able to say when it's good, and being able to say 'for your health, you should wear these overshoes' or 'you should be careful how you use your pallet puller'. It's being able to naturally share positive feedback and give improvement feedback.

Because we have jobs that are sometimes physical for some of them, and sometimes people think that retail has a bad image because of heavy lifting, because we work in a logistics platform, need to drive vehicles. There is an image issue for retail jobs, and people don't necessarily see all the efforts made to guarantee health and safety. Many business sectors invest heavily in safety. In retail, we are also well able to do so. For us, it's important to spread this safety culture. We implemented a few years ago, in 2021, health, safety, and quality of work life representatives in all our supermarkets and logistics platforms. These representatives are trained and they lead all the initiatives around health, safety, and prevention in general across all our locations.

The keys are indeed to identify your network, so to have referents, to train them—that's the key: give them a foundation. Then to create the momentum so that if they have a question, they know who to turn to. There is a logic of sharing practices and emulation on these health, safety, and quality of work life topics. And then, were these people already passionate about the topic? Ah, not all of them. Because when you launch, we put out a call for volunteers. We didn't always have enough volunteers, so we asked some people to take on this role. They are assistant managers, so assistants to the supermarket manager or director, and in logistics platforms there are also dedicated referents. In supermarkets, the challenge is to allocate time. When you are running a supermarket, focused on commercial activity, it's not easy to say 'I will dedicate this time to my role as SQVT captain'. So how do you ensure it really gets implemented? It's clearly the team. We have a national team and teams in each region. We have 25 regions and 1,600 supermarkets, so it's a network of 1,600 people plus the 25 platforms. We have national and regional teams coordinating. They are truly the key to this operating model. Ultimately, the challenges are first to define the missions: what is expected of them, what they can intervene on, and where their role stops. There are topics we don't ask them to handle. There are very personal issues where they can alert, but they won't necessarily take charge of very specific situations like sexual violence or medical issues. We will guide them. It's also about listening to the mental or physical health of their teammates. The challenge is to define the missions and then define time that can be dedicated to this mission. We just added it to the schedules, so it's formalized. You can plan your time for this SQVT captain role. It's not just something you do a little when you have time on top of everything else. No, it's truly the referent role that you are expected to exercise.

For example, being able, from the very start of a position or arrival at a supermarket or platform, to convey the message about warm-ups. When you start your workday, you warm up. It's called PEPS (for teams in good health). You warm up before stocking fruits and vegetables, before doing your preparation in the platform. It should become a ritual, it takes time to implement but it must become a ritual. So that's the warm-ups, the good practices we will put in place, the safety rules. We will launch a safety minute to remind very regularly of our safety rules or expectations, standards in terms of safety. Then, being the referent for support issues, for example on topics around disability. 'I have a question, my SQVT captain can answer it or direct it if they don't know.' So again, they need to be well trained because it covers quite a bit. There is a very strong facilitation dimension.

For 5 years we have been continuing to decrease in terms of frequency rate and severity rate. It's never enough, so we continue to work on these topics. It's hard to say if it's directly linked to the implementation of the SQVT captains or not. What we also see is the increase in our rate of workers with disabilities in our teams, but that also goes with our disability policy that we launched with the first disability agreement a little over 3 years ago. So obviously, it contributes to creating a culture around health, safety, and prevention. It's hard to measure, we monitor it through our safety results, but that's only part of the perceived impact.

Yes, absolutely. It's about explaining the benefits of getting recognized as a disabled worker, and then supporting with workplace accommodations, for example.

Indeed, 1,600 supermarkets and logistics platforms. At Amazon, you have everyone on the same site, it's completely different. So that's the whole interest of our network: being able to have referents in each of our supermarkets who can facilitate and respond or listen to the topics. It's easy to think it's easy, but it's not so easy in practice. It's simpler when you are on a given site to enforce a rule about parking or vehicle traffic because you can spend the whole day or several times a week there. Here, with 1,600 supermarkets, you have to rely on your network.

Differently, I don't know, because what was launched wasn't launched by me; it was launched by the teams before my arrival. And I think that's a real strength. We can always continue to improve. I think that in the business, we obviously have economic indicators and HR indicators. It's really about ensuring that safety is non-negotiable. If you are good on everything else but not on safety, then you are not good. And that, for me, is the message we need to get across: it's a priority, it's not up for debate.

So polyvalence is indeed part of our model. And for me, it's a real strength. Because this polyvalence brings both diversity in your job, diversity of skills, so it's good for your development, and diversity in postures, so it's good for your health and safety. For me, these three points are key. We explain it because it's how we operate, and we claim it. For us, it creates a dynamic of posture development and diversity in service of the customer that is very favorable. We explain it to candidates. It's likely that it doesn't suit everyone, but the employees who have chosen this polyvalence appreciate it. And that's okay, as we said in a previous episode, sometimes you have to embrace your uniqueness as an organization and accept that some candidates won't match, and it's fine. In any case, we clearly explained the 'why'. If the perspective is to stand at the checkout waiting for customers, that's not our way of working. So we are very clear about that.

In a supermarket structure, we have a store manager, assistant managers, checkout coordinators, and we have versatile team members who can handle checkout, stocking, and also all the life of the supermarket regarding freshness, other missions, implementing actions, etc. So when you work in a supermarket, you are able to perform all these missions. So it brings a lot of versatility and development. You have a very strong policy around training and development, so it's well illustrated in that.

Three tips: talk about it, talk about it with the safety and health experts of course, but also with employees. I think express yourself on the subject, gather ideas, recommendations. Then, train. I think you cannot be alone on this topic; all stakeholders need to be involved on safety issues. Then, communicate about all the actions that are implemented, highlight initiatives around health and safety.

Regarding telework, at our headquarters and regional offices we have between one and two days of telework per week. So we maintain a very strong connection with our teams, and that's very important to us. However, when teleworking, we also need to support disconnection, the ability to take breaks, to organize oneself to balance professional activity and personal life. That too is part of our topics, and we work on it with the headquarters and regional teams. It's not necessarily the same issues, but it's handled the same way. Just because the employee isn't here doesn't mean we don't need to take care of them.

So we have organized conferences, we try to regularly talk about this topic quite freely to also free up speech for those who need to express themselves. But that's part of our themes: we cover all our populations, both in supermarkets, logistics platforms, regional offices, and headquarters. There are many topics, but it's true that in HR topics too, there are many things that seem obvious but aren't. There are false good ideas circulating.

And we need... I need to work, I need to see my colleagues, my team, it's key for me. You too, I think. And then you have the whole artifice of saying 'because your work environment is nice, fun' - the whole cliché of the ping-pong table. That's a point of caution. We need a much deeper approach than that.

Thank you Chloé, have a nice day.