Hello, this is Charlotte Baris. L'Express invites you to discover its new podcast. Every week, in Anatomy of a Decision, one of our journalists interviews a figure from the economic, political or military world who had to make a crucial decision in their career. A decision whose consequences could be positive, sometimes negative, but from which we can all learn. Enjoy listening.
Orpea, the endless scandal? New damning information against Orpea: the group made savings using public money. Les Fossoyeurs, revelation of the system that mistreats our elderly. Residents deprived of basic care, diapers, meals rationed to maximize profits, and practices of embezzlement of public money. This is the Orpea system revealed by Victor Castanet. In the recent history of French capitalism, there are not many companies that have been so thoroughly tarnished. Orpea. The affair began on January 24, 2022 with the publication in the newspaper Le Monde of excerpts from the investigative book by journalist Victor Castanet, Les Fossoyeurs. A book that reveals massive fraud and mistreatment by the world's number one in nursing homes. Immediately afterwards, the then CEO, Yves Le Man, was asked to leave the company. And in July 2022, Laurent Guillot took the reins of the group, then in near bankruptcy. He knows nothing about nursing homes and has spent his entire career in industry, notably at Saint-Gobain. His mission? To do a total reset of Orpea.
I am Béatrice Mathieu. In this episode of Anatomy of a Decision, Laurent Guillot has agreed to dissect this adventure with us.
Good morning, Laurent Guillot.
So we're going back in time and we are on July 1, 2022. It is officially your first day at the company. You arrive at the headquarters in La Défense and you decide that day to gather all the company employees, at least those who remain, via video conference. What do you tell them?
Actually, I have been in the company for 2 months but as an advisor to the chairman. So I already had time to get my bearings, to look at the company, to visit many sites and facilities, and so from the very first day, I share with them what our priorities will be. Priority number one: health and safety at work. It's true, as you reminded me, I come from industry, I don't know much about care professions, but I immediately saw that the problems of accidents in facilities are gigantic, extremely important. And taking care of our employees so that they can take care of patients and residents will be our first priority from day one. The second priority, obviously, is to put care and support for the elderly and patients we welcome in our mental health clinics and aftercare back at the heart of the company, and thus to move away from the previous model, which is based more on real estate. And the third priority, obviously, was to put ethics back at the heart of the company, since you reminded us, the Orpea scandal and the book were largely about financial malpractice. So these are the three priorities that I remind them of on the first day. The reactions. I think the first reaction was to ask me, and I think it was healthy to ask me, why they should trust me, knowing that they had had a leader before who in a certain way had deceived them. And the answer I gave at that time was to tell them, 'Listen, I'm not asking you to trust me today, it's much too soon, we'll walk a path together and you will see that the actions we take will be consistent with the commitments I make today, with the priorities I set for us.'
So, the context of mistrust, as we just said, is enormous at that time. You have to rebuild trust with employees, with families, with patients, but you also have to manage to recruit, to rebuild trust with the outside world. How did you go about rebuilding teams when, frankly, at that time, going to work for Orpea, no one wanted to?
You're not entirely right. First of all, because from day one I was the bearer, and very quickly with a team close to me, I was the bearer of a renewal project in which the people who joined us at the very beginning could tell themselves that in 2 years, in 3 years, in 4 years, they could look back and be proud of what they had done. And selling a project like that is extremely appealing. So we were able to attract great talent from day one. After that, what is more complicated is in the facilities, in the middle management, because we don't reach them directly, and the meaningful project takes time to percolate to all levels of the company. That's why we had to communicate a lot, communicate regularly at the beginning, almost every two weeks, communicate about what we were doing, always within the same priorities. Pedagogy is repetition, so you have to repeat the priorities and show that you are making small steps, small progress, show that you are moving in the right direction systematically, and then be extremely transparent. We were completely transparent. It was a very important word from the start: come see us in our facilities, ask me all the questions. As for our employees, they took a little time to dare. But your attitude, the fact of going into the field almost every weekend during the first year, meant that people gradually got to know you, trust you, saw you, and so gradually they regained trust in you. So that was really an extremely important area of work: set the direction, show the progress little by little in those directions, and then play transparency systematically.
So, in this reconstruction, there is a big financial aspect. When you arrive at the company, the company is on the verge of bankruptcy, the debts are astronomical, there have been financial malpractices at all levels. How do you also convince financial partners to follow you? Because it's a financial catastrophe.
