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Podcast in French: Hypergrowth and employee development

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Podcast in French: Hypergrowth and employee development

15/12/2021 by Yaniro Podcast

With Anne-Laure Hamery, Director of Human Resources at Preligens.

How do you combine hypergrowth and employee development? This is what Anne-Laure Hamery, Vice President Human Resources at Preligens, a software company founded in 2016 by Arnaud Guérin and Renaud Allioux, explains to us. The startup, which uses Artificial Intelligence to address international security issues, works for intelligence and security players, particularly in the defence sector.

Today, the company has 170 employees, 65% in the tech team and 35% in growth operations, and has 5 subsidiaries abroad (in Washington, Singapore, Berlin, Brussels and London).

To succeed in its hypergrowth phase, a start-up like Preligens must help its employees to grow as fast as it does. Based on this conviction, the company has put in place a genuine HR policy for employee development based on four pillars, which Anne-Laure Hamery explains in detail.

Investing time and money in the development of Preligens' employees.

Employee development (or People Development) was largely initiated and encouraged by the founders.

The need for it became apparent during the recruitment wave that followed the Series A funding round. The HR team wondered how to onboard 100 people at a time and transmit the company's culture to them.

"When we thought about it with the founders and the HR team, we said to ourselves "Our first relays will be the managers. So how are we going to help these managers to pass on this culture, [...] to pass on this DNA that is innovation for us? How are we going to be able to support them?", says Anne-Laure.

This is where the idea of building a managerial course came from.

In a context of strong growth, the role of managers is to ensure the stability of the company, to support growth and to maintain the culture. But to do this, they need to be helped and supported.

It is based on several pillars:

  • Training and coaching
  • Feedback culture
  • Corporate commitment
  • Diversity and inclusion
  • Quality of life at work

The HR team works on these topics, each with a dedicated person.
 

The first pillar: training and coaching

Setting up a training plan

To implement a skills development policy that supports growth, it is first necessary to identify the needs of managers in order to draw up a training plan.

This plan must be linked to the company's strategic development priorities.

100% of employees have access to training thanks to a substantial budget and the implementation of learning tools managed by the People Development and Learning Manager.

E-learning 

Preligens has set up an e-learning tool that allows employees to self-train. And here are the themes that are most frequently studied:

  • Innovation: a priority at Preligens, which allocates a substantial budget to exploring new technologies and new working methods.
  • Priority management and project management: a subject in great demand during the hypergrowth phase
  • Management: not only for managers, but also for cross-functional management. Among the recurring themes in management for managers, there is "managing in uncertainty", in response to the difficulty of being a manager in a hypergrowth company.

Big Bang Afternoons

The HR team has also introduced Big Bang Afternoons, which are Thursday afternoons free of meetings and dedicated to personal development.
Employees have two options:

  • Either they do an "individual Big Bang": they develop themselves on a topic of their choice. For example, a developer can train on Elasticsearch or try out a new technology that they do not use on a daily basis.
  • Or they do a "collective Big Bang": this involves working in squads on collective themes.

Big Bang Afternoons are usually introduced by a "Big Bang Speaker", an inspirational person such as Éric Rochant, the director of Bureau des Légendes, skipper Philippe Hartz, or Martin Giard, Director of Research at the CNRS and head of the Institute for Space Affairs.

The Big Bang Speakers are varied in order to instil innovation and give another dimension to employee development.

"It allows us to meet people we would never meet in our daily lives," says Anne Laure.

  • Coaching

As part of its hypergrowth, Preligens has set up a coaching plan for all managers (manager, Head Of, Director, VP, etc.).
Even the founders are accompanied by coaches.

Overall results: encouraging

Knowing that the startup has integrated 100 people in less than 10 months this year, it can analyse its results:

  • Its turnover is less than 5%, while the tech market has an average of 15%.
  • Its level of productivity allows it to have double-digit growth.

These very good figures show that the support of the managerial stratum and the training of employees are a growth factor, and even more so in an ultra innovative sector such as AI.

The second pillar: the feedback culture

This is managed by the HR manager.

Helping Preligens employees to grow also involves HR assessments. The HR team has of course worked upstream on the company's values to determine the evaluation of soft skills, but it has also quickly put in place a feedback culture.

Anne-Laure considers that this is a measure that works very well, that does not require major resources, and that provides an excellent ROI, if the testimonies of new recruits are to be believed.

The feedback culture is part of the spirit of co-construction that drives the HR department. At Preligens, all HR processes are the result of a company-wide workshop. For example, the HR team determined the five pillars of manager evaluation in collaboration with individual contributors, various managers and the management team.

"It was a great build-up with everyone and it worked quite well," Anne-Laure sums up.

How to implement a feedback culture?

During their onboarding at Preligens, all employees, whether managers or individual contributors, go through a two-hour session called culture immersion, during which they are taught the entire company culture, including the feedback culture. This is an opportunity to explain to them how they will be evaluated as employees and how they will evaluate their managers.

This onboarding phase is important to reassure managers, who may be worried about the feedback culture. In the manager course, there is also a training module that teaches them how to handle delicate situations during their evaluation.

Anne-Laure has been working on the feedback culture for six years and has found that the exercise is carried out with goodwill.

Which HR tools should I use?

  • Lucca: an HRMS tool used for all HR assessments (probationary period, annual interview...), and in particular the Poplee Interviews module. HR has customized the trial period interview, the annual interview and the monitoring of employee objectives.

The third pillar: the commitment of the company

This is a very important point for Preligens, which works for the defence industry.

Some employees are reservists, so the HR team has created a partnership with the Ministry of the Armed Forces to supervise and facilitate their access to the reserves. It is a theme linked to the business sector that creates a lot of commitment from employees.

The fourth pillar: diversity and inclusion

The HR team dealt with several themes around the topics of diversity and inclusion.

  • Discrimination against people over 45 in start-ups, when the company needs to recruit senior profiles or those undergoing professional retraining to manage and support the company's scaling.
  • Second Parent leave, on which a Gender Equality team has worked.It is equivalent to post-natal maternity leave and starts after the legal 10 weeks of maternity leave. At Preligens, a second parent has exactly the same number of weeks as a mother on maternity leave, with continued pay.
  • Other squads: ecology, AI for NGOs.
    Diversity and Inclusion issues are led by the HR manager and the People Development manager who have set up squads to deal with the various issues.

The squads can be managed by an employee, as is the case for the Ecology squad.

There is also a squad, run by employees, which works on algorithms to make them available to NGOs, for example an NGO specialising in illegal fishing on the high seas.

The 5th pillar: quality of life at work

Care is an essential element at Preligens, so HR has chosen several tools. 

Psychological support

The Moka.care platform was set up at the time of the confinement and quickly became a great success. In a rather special context, it provided access to life coaches or psychologists, with Preligens fully financing the first 4 sessions.

Sport

Employees can take advantage of sports courses with Trainme, a sports platform subsidiary of Décathlon.
One of the original offers from Preligens is dry-diving lessons given by the French champion Clémentine Marie, who knows the founders.
These courses are very successful because they combine breathing, relaxation and meditation exercises.

Teleworking

During the lockdown, HR worked on their hybrid telework policy to anticipate the return to normalcy.

The team determined different modalities:

  • 100% telework
  • Recurrent telework: 3 days per week of office work
  • Occasional telework

Only 15% of employees (often developers) requested 100% remote.

Future plans for further employee development

The HR team is currently thinking about its themes for 2022, in particular related to QWL (Quality of Working Life) and Psychosocial hazard, to which it has not yet devoted much time because the company had to be structured.

We will have to continue to develop and innovate in the areas of employee evaluation and support, the development of co-construction, in short, organisational issues.

The creation of a recruitment campus is also planned.

In the field of training, one of the topics requested is cognitive bias.

"We are going to work on a number of other subjects", says the VP HR.
The founders of Preligens have just passed on their company vision to all employees, so "we're going to think about how to fit our ideas into this company vision", she concludes.

Find Anne-Laure Hamery on LinkedIn.

Anne-Laure's recommended book:

  • "The Culture Map", by Erin Meyer. "It's a bit of a trendy book at the moment in startups but it allowed us to take a step back on how to transmit the culture of Preligens in a scaling phase.
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