Europcar Mobility Group Case Study

This is a summary of a presentation given at Shared Services Digital Week Europe. The full presentation is viewable here.

With the COVID-19 major health – but also economic and financial – crisis, we learned how important it was for the EUROPCAR Shared Services Organization to rely on its human assets – their talents but also their flexibility, agility and above all their dedication and team spirit!

Starting on day one in March last year, we had to move 380 employees to work remotely, from home. This created major technical and organizational challenges to guarantee to our customers that 80% of our capacity and 100% of our productivity would remain available online (and it was a real challenge!).

In parallel, we decided to focus on the people first, because we realized how challenging this new situation would be for each of them. We were also quickly forced to implement new restrictions, such as partial layoffs, to adjust our SSC workforce to a 50% reduction of our business volume, and the equivalent for our cash costs.

Let me tell you that without a great team spirit, workforce flexibility and agility in the Lisbon SSC, it would not have been possible.

During the crisis we also developed a special social initiatives program called "Let's do it TOGETHER," aimed at helping our employees and their families to manage this exceptionally difficult situation. We invited each manager to personally take the lead – and the sponsorship – of one key social initiative from the following:

1. Financial coaching: sponsor Guy MERCIER
2. Legal advice: sponsor Suzana CASTRO
3. Psychological assistance: sponsor Carla POLIDO
4. Medical remote assistance: sponsor Carla POLIDO
5. Family counsel and day-to-day best practices sharing: Elisabeth DROUFFE
6. Isolation of employees living alone: sponsor Sonia MONTERO
7. Professional Training to learn new languages or other things: sponsor Joao FIGUEIROA

This was a tremendous human success with a direct impact on the results of the employee satisfaction survey we conducted in February 2021.

We reached a participation score of 85%,  with 93% of our employees being "satisfied to very satisfied" with the home office solution.

The lessons learned from the crisis include:

• If you want to be able to build a positive outcome in the post-COVID-19 period where the VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) factors will continue to heavily impact your SSC operating resources and management style, you will have to continue to consider People Management as one of your top priorities.
• New technologies (AI, RPA, IA....) or process simplifications will only be a condition for you to survive, but not a guarantee to succeed in reinventing the new workplace.
• Take care of your people and they will show you how capable and powerful their team spirit can be to (re)build the future.

Europcar Mobility Group Shared Services Center opened in January 2014 in Lisbon Portugal as a captive near shore model.

You can watch Guy and Elisabeth's full presentation (part of SSO Week Europe) at this link.

If you would like to discuss the organizational impact of any of these social initiatives feel free to reach out to elisabeth.drouffe@europcar.com or guyhenrimercier@gmail.com.