Reworked TV
In Brief
- One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Rolling out global tools at Pernod Ricard requires sensitivity to cultural differences, market maturity and operational realities — especially in a decentralized organization.
- Flexibility Drives Adoption: Aubin Colleaux's DEX team's light governance and test-and-learn approach allow for local experimentation and faster user buy-in, even if it means accepting a bit of technology “mess.”
- Community-Led Success: Combining centrally created change management toolkits with shared local success stories enables more effective scaling and consistent progress across regions.
Reworked editor in chief Siobhan Fagan welcomes Aubin Colleaux to Three Dots. Aubin is the head of digital employee experience at Pernod Ricard, a global company with a truly international footprint. Aubin discusses how he and his team approach technology provisioning across so many cultures, regions and brands.
They discuss the flexibility Pernod Ricard allows in the DEX, how he and his team approach governance and how they adapt lessons from different regions to help scale their efforts. Tune in for more.
Table of Contents
- 19,000 Employees, 200 Brands, 160 Countries, 1 Company
- All the Considerations That Go Into Regional Technology Delivery
- How Does a Technology Rollout Differ Between Two Regions?
- Accept a Little Mess in Your Technology Environments
- Regional Differences in Employee Expectations of Technology
- Using Local Internal Comms to Drive Global Content Interest
- Enterprise Social Networks: Today's Landscape, Through a 2015 Lens
19,000 Employees, 200 Brands, 160 Countries, 1 Company
Siobhan: Hi everybody and welcome to today's episode of Three Dots. I am Siobhan Fagan, editor in chief of Reworked and today we're going to be talking about handling the digital employee experience in a global organization. To talk about that today, I am happy to have Aubin Colleaux joining me. He is the head of digital employee experience at Pernod Ricard.
Welcome, Aubin!
Aubin: Hey, everybody. Hi, Siobhan. Thanks for having me today.
Siobhan: I'm so glad that you came here to talk about this. So I just want to kind of set the stage for our audience. I was not aware before I started speaking to you how wide Pernod Ricard's spread is. So I made just a quick list of some of the different organizations that you also fall under your umbrella. You have Jameson's in Ireland. You have Jefferson's Bourbon in the United States. You have Inverroche Gin in South Africa as of last month. Seagram's Gin in Canada, Havana Club Rum in Cuba. You're in Armenia. You're in India. You're in China. You're in Mexico, Belarus, Malaysia, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, Philippines. I mean, you're everywhere.
Is this a fairly accurate picture?
Aubin: Yes, it's an accurate picture. Pernod Ricard is the number one premium wine and spirit manufacturer in the world. We have 19,000 employees that produce and distribute around 200 brands in over 160 countries. So yes, quite a global company.
Siobhan: And so your role is to make sure that the digital employee experience across all of these different affiliates, all of these different print-out record companies is smooth and everybody's kept up to speed. Is that right? Can you talk a little bit about that?
Aubin: I sit in a global tech team — it's one of the global teams that we have in Pernod Ricard. I'm within the digital workplace team and we deal with all the collaboration and communication products, change management, communication to other employees, as well as the continuous improvement of the digital experience.
We are technology centered and user centered as well, I would say. And we try to provide as unified an experience as possible in a very complex and very global environment.
Siobhan: Adding to that complexity is the fact that the employee workforce is split between sort of office-based workers and also frontline workers, correct?
Aubin: Correct. It's quite balanced, actually. About a third of our employees, they are classic office workers, very connected, working in our office. Thirty percent of the workforce is salespeople, the sales force, much more mobile, quite connected as well, but much more mobile, of course. And then the last third is frontline workers, so people working in the distilleries, the batching lines, etc, who are more disconnected.
All the Considerations That Go Into Regional Technology Delivery
Siobhan: Let's start diagramming this out. When you're looking at delivering these collaboration tools to this very, very diverse workforce, how do the differences in both cultural and regional, and also the differences between frontline and office work, how do you approach the rollout in those cases?
Aubin: I think the first point to have in mind is we have to consider the environment historically. Pernod Ricard is quite a decentralized company because of the global footprint, also because of the culture of the company, where in order to be closer to the consumers and in order to grow the business, we have to have some kind of autonomy in what we are going to do at the local level. And also because, as I was mentioning, it's a portfolio of 200 brands, acquisitions, etc.
And so integrating companies with also a different culture, different systems. Considering all of that makes it an environment that can be quite complex technologically speaking, but also in terms of culture and differences in terms of culture. So we have to consider these many factors when we are going to deliver a project, implement a new system or a new product.
We look at priority markets where we have the most impact. We'd be looking at cultural specificities. Basically, you don't roll out the same way in India or in the US. It's just that the culture is not the same.
You also need to look at the maturity of the different markets. Some markets will be more advanced in technology, in the ways of working, in the overall digitization, for example, and so you also have to take that into consideration. And at the end of the day, you have to rely also heavily on the local stakeholders to help you deploy at the process level in order to have a successful delivery.
How Does a Technology Rollout Differ Between Two Regions?
Siobhan: That makes sense. You're talking about this very complex combination of tools, especially when you have the acquisitions, they're all on their own platforms, et cetera. Is there a specific tool that is universally used across the company or if not universally, broadly used across the company that you could use as an example?
Aubin: I could take two examples, one that is in the future, that is the ERP. It's the most recent one that we've launched. Today we have 60 different ERPs and working to add one global platform. But that is the future.
Today we have very few universal systems, but one that we have that is managed in our team is the collaboration environment. Mainly Microsoft 365, but basically that set of tools that we deliver for the overall organization and basically allowing somebody that would be based in Australia to collaborate smoothly with somebody that would be based in Colombia or somebody that would be based in France. Which is something super important in such a global organization, of course, because this how we deliver at the end of the day the many brands that we have into the different markets in which we operate.
Siobhan: Absolutely. So you used as an example earlier that you would handle the rollout to the United States different than to India. So if we could keep with those, or if you want to use two other regions, how would the rollout differ between those two specific examples?
Aubin: Of course, it would depend on the platform. But let's take one example when we drove the global adoption of Microsoft Teams. So it's a project we started right before COVID, actually. So when COVID happened, we were happy to have it launched already.
There were regions that had already some maturity on those kind of platforms, but using it at a local level. Tthe strategy is how we are going to use those regions to drive the overall organization. Because at the end of the day, the business case is quite obvious that we need everybody to be on the same platform in order to collaborate.
Then it's really going to be about how fast we can bring the different entities onto the platform and how comfortable we are going to make the employees on those platforms. So to make sure that we reach minimum level of maturity and comfort, to make sure that at the organization level, we have an efficient usage, something that actually brings value to the organization.
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Siobhan: In your role as head of the digital employee experience, I imagine a huge part of what you're doing is sort of orchestrating between all of these different areas. So when you are dealing with different regions, how do you ensure that they get, let's just continue with Teams, they're getting their team on Teams, while also allowing for them to handle the rollout in their own way? You don't want to have a gap between different areas of the organization clearly because you want that collaboration going on — so how do you coordinate with the different areas?
Aubin: And orchestrating and I would also say engaging because it's also a local decision to bring the employees on the platform, right? And to make it part of your day to day.
So it's also how we are going to engage sponsors at local level, how we are going to get with the executive committees, for instance, to make it a project, not just at the global level, but also at the local level.
And then at one level down, also engaging key stakeholders, champions, we could call them, from tech, from the business as well. These stakeholders that are going to deploy the solutions, most importantly, the ways of working that come with it at the local level. Our job in that, apart from providing the solutions, is also to provide a package that will make it easy to deploy at the local level; anything that has to do with change management, with communication, what we can produce at global level to basically make the life easier at the local level. Things that can be adapted, of course, to the local specificities, but that can also accelerate the delivery and at the end to drive the adoption forward.
Siobhan: I like that. So you're basically creating a package of templates for the local area and they can adjust as they see needed for whatever differences in terms of people's adoption rates and things like that, so it's flexibility within a centralized package.
Aubin: Yes, this and the other way around as well is very important. I do believe in the power of communities. And so, at a global level to provide assets that can then be leveraged at the local level, but that also at the global level, we look at what's being done at the local level, what works very well, the success stories.
We are also able to take that to repackage so that then we can also reuse. It's super important, this role of identifying those best practices and then fostering the reuse in other regions. It's just a matter of efficiency as well, so we do not reinvent the wheel.
In a global project like the deployment of Microsoft Teams, for instance, we have seen so many events, so many communication ideas, etc., that were also designed at the local level and which we were able to reuse at the more global level. This is also what makes a big difference.
Accept a Little Mess in Your Technology Environments
Siobhan: I'm curious if that practice, if that ground up adoption as well as top down adoption, if that was always your approach or was there kind of an experience where you tried to push a software out where you discovered, wait, we do have to allow for these differences.
Aubin: For us, it's rather the other way around because again, if we consider the Microsoft environment, our philosophy is to drive the adoption as much as possible, which means that of course, we come up with a few boundaries because you have to keep control over the scope, but within those boundaries, it's basically quite open. So light governance. We're quite convinced that this drives the adoption of the technology, because people have more space to try it by themselves.
The consequence is that after a few months and after a few years, then you might not be so tidy, your technological environment. And we have to be very comfortable with that somehow. Accept the mess to a certain level, because again, it's what makes the adoption.
The more we go and the more we can refine as well, set some more boundaries when we need to, sometimes open as well when we notice that we've been too strong from the start and maybe slowing the adoption a bit. So it's all a question of balance. I'm not a fan of the top-down approach where the governance is set from the start, even before you starting deploying the solution. It's more of a test and learn journey, and we continuously adapt along the way.
Siobhan: It sounds like a very iterative approach, which I think is probably even more necessary with the rate of releases that are coming out of Microsoft 365. When you look at that, when you look at how quickly new things are rolling out, how much latitude do different regions have in choosing to deploy something?
Are there cases where some groups might want to use Viva Engage for communications and then other areas don't actually want to have that kind of communication where anybody can jump in ... and those sort of differences?
Aubin: We try to be open. So again, not preventing usage, but more accepting to open from the start. And then let's see how it goes. It comes with a few challenges, because sometimes these new things that a vendor like Microsoft may be pushing six months after, 12 months after, they actually decide to remove it. That's fine. That's part of the game.
This is also how we keep driving innovation and adoption of the technology. So we do keep open and then we try to consider, OK, if it makes sense to push proactively at a global level because there is a benefit for the organization or whether it's just here, it's not closed, but it's also allowing to see some opportunities when we have a market that is interested.
A few examples are Viva Engage or Viva Insight, for instance. These are not platforms that we use at a global level, but in some affiliates and because we didn't have a strong use case to use globally, but we have some affiliates that have interest in using those solutions because they have more maturity on those topics. So we are also able to address these needs.
Regional Differences in Employee Expectations of Technology
Siobhan: You said at the very beginning, you were talking about how you take a user-centered approach to the digital employee experience. And I'm wondering if you have noticed any differences in terms of employee expectations of the tools that they use, and if so, what you do to address that?
Aubin: We run a survey every year on our solution and to gauge user satisfaction and the challenges they may encounter, etc. And it's always super interesting to see the results because this is typically the kind of differences that we notice.
For example, we see that people in the US, North America in general, have much, much higher expectations in terms of the experience that they are going to have with their products. They also tend to be more satisfied. These are the same solutions that we deliver globally, but they have higher expectations, but also higher satisfaction.
If we compare with Europe, where the satisfaction is much lower, but also the expectations are much lower. Same goes for region like India, for example. So it's also something that we need to take into consideration when we deploy something at a global level is to know that the level of expectation is not the same. The requirements or expectations in terms of the experience that we are going to provide are not the same. And we have some countries that will have much higher expectations. And so maybe we have to put more effort in terms of communication, change management, and not to talk, of course, about the quality of the product itself.
So this is where we are going to focus, for example.
Siobhan: It sounds like we Americans are very demanding, but also easily pleased. I apologize.
Can I ask, as far as the actual visual of the platform that they're using, is there common branding across every region, or do they have regional differences for that?
Aubin: No, because most of those platforms today, are global. So of course, SaaS solutions, they are under their own branding. But when it comes to the workplace platform, the entry door, we just call it intranet. It's a bit more than an intranet, but it's built in-house.
It's called My Portal. Basically, the idea is that it's an entry door. And it's the same for everybody with that common branding. And once you enter into that environment, then you have many, many things. And sometimes they can be different, even though we try to align. That's a big journey because a lot of solutions, a lot of interfaces, etc.
It's not an easy one, but at least this entry door brings some kind of unification to the experience. And yeah, basically, the way you are going to interact with your digital workplace environment is quite similar, whether you are based in China ... or China might be a bit particular.
The same in Japan or in the UK, for instance.
Using Local Internal Comms to Drive Global Content Interest
Siobhan: I imagine that you work very closely with your internal communications department when doing this sort of change management. So are they also doing the same sort of orchestration with the local internal communications in terms of helping along with this change management and also with making sure that the news and the information that people receive is both they get the centralized big company business, but also the local?
Aubin: Yes, it's actually quite similar in the way we operate. And not so long ago, I was also managing those internal communication solutions. And I say that the way we deliver the solutions today is also inspired by the way we were operating before on the communication side.
which again, do believe that for people to use a solution to consume content on an internet, you also have to be as close as possible to their interests, what they have in mind, et cetera. And you cannot achieve that if it's just a top-down stuff from global to local.
And so the idea was actually the reverse when we built that internet platform was to first drive the adoption at the local level with content that is of interest for the people in the different affiliates and make sure that we have a strong usage at that level.
And once we have that basically, we also have that platform in which we can deliver our global content. And you end up with a mix of global information, local information that is consumed because the platform is actually adopted at the local level.
Siobhan: I want to ask every company if they take the same approach, because listening to you describe that, it makes absolute sense. Get people to buy in to the things that they're initially going to be interested in. And then you start sneaking in the broader company news.
Enterprise Social Networks: Today's Landscape, Through a 2015 Lens
Siobhan: I do have another question that's a little bit off topic — related, but off topic. But I noticed you did your master's thesis in enterprise social networks about 10 years ago or so. And I saw that and I was like, ooh, just because that's a big topic now.
When Workplace for Meta decided that they were gonna retire the platform, it called into question enterprise social networks' place in businesses now. Do you have any thoughts about how that's changed in the 10 years since you wrote your thesis?
Aubin: It's a tough one. I think that the questions we are having today, they are not so different that the ones we were having 10 years ago. The big question 10 years ago, it was still the beginning of enterprise social network, so we were already talking a lot about information overload and saying that we are overloaded by email. And 10 years after, basically we are still seeing information overload and overloaded by emails and now plus by chat and all those collaboration platforms. So the challenges, the pain points, they are still the same.
I do think what has evolved is first, the maturity on the topics from the users and from a technology standpoint. People are more mature, more comfortable with those tools, which also drives the usage.
But the questions that we were having back in 2015, like how is it going to bring value to the company? How do we measure the efficiency? How do we measure the return on investment? These are still the same questions.
And the odd thing back at the time, whether Enterprise Social Network was going to replace email at some point. Ten years after, we can say, no, it just adds up. And the new question today is whether GenAI and those Copilots and ChatGPT agents are going to also make our life easier and probably replace part of those tools.
Let's see in 10 years, probably the answer is going to be the same.
Siobhan: Is it going to be the same, or just going to layer up on top of that. Thank you so much, Aubin. Is there anything that we didn't cover that you wanted to talk about in this conversation?
Aubin: I think it was a pretty good overview of what we can deliver at Pernod Ricard. I'm always happy to talk about those topics. I think one word to conclude and relate it to that question about the evolution of the environment: I can say for the past 10 years, it's been a super environment to work in, a very dynamic one, a lot of innovation, a lot of projects to drive and technology adoption to drive. The next couple of years look as exciting. So it's great to actually work in that field.
Siobhan: We'll have to check back in with you in 10 years. Well, thank you so much, Aubin, thank you for joining us today.
Aubin: Thank you.
