Laurent, hello and thank you for visiting us. Very happy, very happy to have you by my side for many reasons. And to set the scene, I don't know if you remember, but the first time we met was, I think, 24 hours after you took up your post in the middle of a European crisis. I arrived, we started talking because you are, after all, one of our largest members at CERP, and you told me, 'I think I'm crazy, I think I'm crazy to have come.' No, it was the first day, so once I said that, well, today we would like to know, since you have been in your position for four years now and have considerably changed the company—starting with its name—what do you see today in the journey you have made over these four years in terms of evolution, transformation, and change? What still needs to be done at the company level to truly consolidate it and get it out of the rut, both economically, in terms of attractiveness, and in terms of occupancy rates? And then, what is your vision for the company over the next 10 to 15 years? But also, now that you are an important expert in our federation, in our elderly care sector, what is your vision for the sector in general—facilities, home care, intermediate housing—for the next 20 years? There you go, it's your turn. You have 10 minutes, a quarter of an hour.
Thank you, thank you, Jean-Christophe. That's a lot of questions. I'll try to take them in order, perhaps starting with the journey traveled. So, I don't remember saying I was crazy, but no doubt I was beginning to realize the scale of the work to be done, and obviously at times it was quite anxiety-inducing. But fundamentally, what hasn't changed in the company? What has changed and will change, and that's the most important thing, is the teams, the commitment of our professionals. You know the business much better than I do, and you know how hyper-engaged our field teams can be at all times, and how their commitment is what saved the company over the medium term. It's their daily work that continued, that didn't stop with the changes at the top. It didn't stop with the media adventures, one might say. And that's what allowed us to turn the company around on a foundation that was still very solid. On the other hand, what has changed? The first thing we tried to change, and it's not finished, is transforming the company culture into an ethical culture. I'd say ethics was the first thing, and that's the easiest part: stating acceptable and unacceptable behaviors. But then transforming the culture to have a quality culture, a service culture at a higher level than when we arrived. And then what has been and still is the most difficult but remains the heart of our transformation is rebuilding trust. Rebuilding trust in the teams, rebuilding the teams' trust in themselves, rebuilding trust externally. Obviously, you mentioned the name change helped us, allowed us to take an additional step, but trust is something that breaks very quickly—we saw that in 2002, it broke very quickly—and takes time to rebuild. So we are on a path: the name change, becoming a mission-driven company, the entry of our new shareholders—all steps that have allowed us to restore trust with everyone. But we still have a way to go on this path of trust and on the transformation of the managerial model, which was very important. We want to give more autonomy, but within a framework and discipline that ensures quality, how we take care of the teams, how we take care of our patients and residents, and how we achieve the economic results of the company on a daily basis. All of that is managed in a unique way. OK.
Another question on the attractiveness of the professions. So once again, I say this to every speaker: this is the major problem for the next 15 to 20 years because we can make projections, ask for money, work on collective agreements, work on artificial intelligence, but at some point we need to motivate young people—and less young people too, by the way—to come and join our sector. We also need to retain staff and help them grow while they are working in our facilities and services. So now, with four years of perspective, both at your company level and across the entire ecosystem, from everything you see because you travel a lot—and that's very good—I follow you on social media constantly, and you take the temperature in your facilities and services, which is great because it also allows you to make decisions and project yourself. What testimony and recipe could you give us, ideally, to create the shock of attractiveness that we all need for the next 10 years?
So, there is no single recipe; there are many things that need to be done. First, the first thing we did upon arriving was to make HR—and I mean our commitment to serving the teams—the top priority. What does that mean? It means we oriented the entire company to say our first priority is to take care of those who take care of others. And that means all our actions, all our daily work, is truly thought of that way because we believe that a service company, especially a healthcare service company for the most vulnerable people, must first focus on ensuring that, in the symmetry of attention, we pay attention to our colleagues. So what does that mean? It means we started working on occupational health and safety. To be attractive, the work environment must first be safe. That is not the case in care professions, and even less so in the medico-social professions today. So we have a lot of work. That obviously involves equipment like rails, lifting equipment, etc., but that's not the most important thing. The most important thing is managerial tension. And when I say managerial tension, it's in both senses: attention in one word and attention in two words. That is, both motivating teams—sometimes by taking sanctions—and at the same time attention in the literal sense, saying, 'Hey, watch out, you're doing something, we need to take care of each other to ensure we work in good conditions.' For us, that has meant, for example, trying to generalize changing shoes. Many people wear clogs. I think they don't stay on the foot, so when there's a bit of water on the floor, you fall. It's the first obligation of any employer—public, private, non-profit—that our colleagues go home healthy in the evening. And that's fundamental. Our sector has accident frequency rates 100 times higher than industry. That's not acceptable. So it starts there, but obviously it also involves salaries, training, and also what we have put in place to take care of our colleagues not only when they are with us but also when they are at home. What does that mean? It means that with a phone call before 5 p.m., if you have problems finding housing for the evening because something happened with your husband, something happened in your family, or you had a fire, we offer you emergency housing for the same evening, find housing for about ten days, and help you find permanent housing. Why? Because we know that housing is the main concern of our colleagues. But we do the same for over-indebtedness issues, for help with daily life, administrative procedures for children's education. So what we try to offer is not only to help them when they are with us, but also more broadly to have social support within the company. That makes us more attractive. After that, you're right, it's not just about attractiveness; we have a quantity problem. The biggest challenge in my view over the next 5, 10, 15 years in our sector is the number of trained people to join our professions. So we need to push public authorities, we need to create training centers. Last year we opened a training center in the Paris region to train our own nursing assistants so they come and stay to work with us. I went to the opening, of course, and the first cohort was very moving. There was a 60-year-old person who worked for us and wanted to go through the training circuit to go back to one of our facilities as a caregiver. That means she was projecting herself into a career of a few more years with us as a caregiver, even though she had already spent several decades as a home care aide. So that's all we need to do, obviously. We need to work on simplifying procedures for VAE, work on reverse VAE. There are enormous things to do. You mentioned digitalization. I think to be attractive and to remove administrative tasks that are not very pleasant, we need to engage much more strongly as a profession in digitalization. It's an attractiveness factor to reduce administrative tasks. A nurse, you know very well in our facilities, an IDEC can spend 40% of her time in her office doing reporting, organizing schedules, making calls—that's work she didn't come for. She didn't become a nurse to do administrative work. If we relieve her of that work, it will be a positive element that will also help keep her with us and make us more attractive than other players who, in parallel, have very slow digitalization.
