How Dassault Systèmes are Driving the Change Towards a more Sustainable Future

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In this episode, I'm joined by Aneta Jajkowska, Senior Director, People & Organisational Partner, Northern Europe at Dassault Systèmes shares how her company is driving change towards a more sustainable future.

Aneta shares how her perspective on sustainability changed after taking an intensive 8-week online course on business sustainability management. The key takeaway - everyone has a role to play in creating a sustainable future, including governments, academia, and especially businesses.

"HR leaders are well positioned to embrace sustainability and actually lead it across the business."

At Dassault Systèmes, Aneta and her team have taken a holistic approach to integrating sustainability into all aspects of the employee experience and company culture. This includes reviewing and updating policies around transportation, benefits, health and wellbeing to be more sustainable. They engaged employees to submit ideas on sustainability initiatives and organized workshops to raise awareness. Dassault Systèmes also added sustainability as a component of their recognition program.

An interesting finding is that more diverse and inclusive companies tend to be more sustainable. According to Aneta, research shows companies with over 33% women in leadership roles have between 33-36% more focus on sustainability. By embracing diverse perspectives, companies can drive innovation and make better decisions around sustainability.

Want to learn more about driving sustainability as an HR leader? Listen to the episode now to lead the people organization toward a sustainable future.

Episode Highlights

HR Can Help Create A Sustainable Company Culture
How to spread the message of sustainability across the organization
Why inclusive companies are more sustainable?

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🎙️ Automatically generated Podcast Transcript

Aneta 0:00

I think we often underestimate what role we have to play as the people organisation. We can lead this topic across the business. This is not just the people topic this touches everything that we do, how we communicate. I really do believe that people in organisation leaders really have the skill set to embrace this topic and to actually lead it across the business.

Chris Rainey 0:31

Hi, everyone, welcome back to the HR leaders podcast. In today's episode, I'm joined by a NASA to Cal Oscar, who just seen a director of pupil and organisational partner for Northern Europe back to Seoul systems during episode and Nestle shares how Dassault systems are driving the change towards a more sustainable future. how HR can help create a sustainable company culture, how to spread the message of sustainability across your organisation and why inclusive companies are more sustainable. It Up. I can't believe I just felt that right at the end. Well, my time is almost going to well. So good. Yeah. I have one Welcome back to the HR leaders podcast. On today's episode, I'm joined by Aneta cacao Oscar, who just Senior Director of people and organisational partner for Northern Europe at the soul systems during episode and that's a shares how Dassault systems are driving the change towards a more sustainable future. how HR can help create a more sustainable company culture, how to spread the message of sustainability across your organisation, and why inclusive companies are more sustainable. As always, before we jump into the video, make sure you hit that subscribe button, turn on a notification bell and follow us on your favourite podcast platform. With that being said, let's jump in. And so welcome to the show. How are you?

Aneta 1:52

Very good today. Thank you, Chris,

Chris Rainey 1:54

tell everyone a little bit more about yourself personally, and your journey to where we are now.

Aneta 1:59

Absolutely. So it's been for me, it's been a bit of a mixed mixed journey and and quite a diverse one. So I will say I feel you know, I feel quite lucky that I had the opportunity to start and people function many years ago, I would say and really stumbled into into the role. While studying something completely different, which was Economics and Management and Marketing has I joined a really great company called Unilever, I had the opportunity to really step into into the people function and and try try to deep dive into the different parts of people in organisation around recruitment training and gave me a taste for for the different elements of the role. And I really fell in love with it never looked back. And I had the chance to work with many great companies like Unilever, Microsoft, called technology, and most recently, Dassault systems.

Chris Rainey 2:54

And on that point, you've been on your own personal journey regarding sustainability. And also as a people function, maybe we should start with your own personal journey, or what do you what do you prefer? Should we talk about the business journey first or your own? What do you think?

Aneta 3:07

I'm happy to talk about weave it in? Let's weave it? No worries. I think there's an it is it is something that that I suppose we had a little chat about before, right? How, what was the perception about sustainability, you know, things that we talked about, probably for a very long time. But I think in a different context. But in terms of you know, the business responsibility, this has become a bigger and bigger topic recently, in my view, and what we what we looked at as a business, and we when we started talking to our customers, our partners, our clients, people really have, you know, have a challenge on how to continue being a more sustainable business, how to do what they do in a more sustainable way. And we really built what we call the leaders in business sustainability approach, focusing on three main areas that are really, really important for businesses, which is product and innovation. How do we innovate produce, in a more sustainable way? Business models, the world is changing, right shared economy, how do we then adjust the work that we do? How do we support smaller businesses that need to make these adjustments? So that they are they're successful, and they're really functioning alongside you know, all the requirements to be sustainable? And people which is how do we make sure that our workforce of the future you know, is inclusive, does consider the different diverse perspective and is actually providing providing the business with a lot of opportunities to think differently to innovate, started talking about that more and more that it's not just technology driving this sustainable future that really it is about how do we invest in the people which got me really interested in the topic and and actually I decided I need to educate myself more, I'm only looking at this topic through what I know, to date. And I would say that learning opportunity came along when we discussed together with couple of my colleagues from the to XCOM. And said, Well, there's a great course called business sustainability Management at the University of Cambridge. He said, Let's do it. There were three of us from the leadership team, we wanted to do that as a cohort to also create our our possibility to, to think about to collaborate to influence potential change. This was an eight week, eight week online course quite intense, I would say, but has really opened my eyes, and helped me to see how can we be a more responsible business? Where do we need to think about in terms of sustainability, and that has really helped me into into thinking in many different directions and how to apply that to the people function. I

Chris Rainey 5:57

love that. What would you say is the main key takeaways you had from that course,

Aneta 6:01

we are all responsible, you know, everybody has a part to play, whether it's governments, whether it's academia, whether it's businesses, but without businesses, the government's will not move as fast. You know, without businesses, there might not be enough momentum created, we do have a responsibility to create that momentum, we do have a responsibility to also be ahead of the game. As you know, we have signed all the wonderful Paris agreements, but we're not making fast enough progress to the policy. So therefore, the businesses can also create, innovate, and really show the way so that the governments can follow

Chris Rainey 6:41

in a practical sense, how have you translated that to the work that you're doing? In the people function?

Aneta 6:47

Originally, we're thinking, Okay, well, you know, is it about creating the right environment is about creating the culture. But at the same time, you literally if you sit back, and you, you look at the whole function end to end and the whole employee journey, you need to embed sustainability from the beginning to the end and throughout and weave it in and everything that we do need to think about, you know, policies as an example, you know, car policy or car loans. Is that redundant? No. Should we be talking about mobility? Should we be talking about changing to electric vehicles schemes, as an example, or maybe even even reducing that and contributing to the commuter allowance, right, there's a way to think about policies and benefits, right? Are we getting our benefits from a sustainable providers, because that's also our responsibility to know where our benefits are coming from? Is it about you know, investing more in health and well being we also see mental health topic being front and centre, that is about supporting the well being of our employees. Now, let's do it in a in a sustainable, proactive way, as opposed to a reactive way. So that's putting policies in place and while being focused. The other topic we talked about that we're still reviewing, and we're still considering just pensions? How do we know where our pensions are being invested in? Yeah, I think the whole ESG finance is still is still fresh brand and new and our pensions being invested in the right things? Are they still being invested in fossil fuels?

Chris Rainey 8:19

This sounds like a huge undertaking. How did you decide where to start? And what are some of the commitments that you've put as goals as targets? You can't do everything in one go? Right?

Aneta 8:31

You can't. And I think there's, we would be adopted actually, which was something as part of our change management programme overall as a business something that we call fit programme, which is, AP stands for fix. So what can we fix in the next 30 days, AI stands for improve, which is what can we improve in the next 90 days, and T is for transform. So that's on the 1212 Plus month horizon. More often than not, you know, the fixes and improves will impact will impact the transformation but you need to take it step by step. It can be overwhelming first and foremost, what's most important, we started talking about talking about it to our employees, because at the end of the day, we cannot expect to be the ones who come up with all the ideas and if we are talking about diversity and inclusion, which is also a super important part of being a sustainable organisation, you need those different perspectives you need those different ideas. So we engaged our our employees as at the beginning to say okay, what is more most important to you, and we have created Green Teams, we across our different offices in the different countries. And we have asked them we have asked them what do you care about? What do we want to impact the most to begin with and some of the local plans actually have been quite inspirational for other for other teams for other for other officers. So as an example, are done Each team decided that they have an opportunity to change our courier service from the current car courier service, they fully they are now fully operating by, by bicycle courier service. Nice, which is amazing. And this was an idea coming from our teams. So I think some of the ideas were really looking inward, what can we do? How are we what are we doing using in terms of our facilities? What are we using in terms of, you know, our providers for our coffees and teas? Are they sustainable?

Chris Rainey 10:31

So really looking at every single element? Or how are you tracking this to see and obviously measure the impact? Obviously,

Aneta 10:38

certain things are being tracked by our facilities teams in terms of our ESG, ratings, usage, etc. Some of it we're tracking, you know, in terms of initiatives, what have we done? And then we also look at our employee engagement survey, where we do have questions around how do you feel that the company is contributing to the society? How are we contributing to our company purpose, which is around sustainability? So we're also tracking kind of the feelings of our employees through the through the satisfaction surveys, or initiatives that we're driving? And? And how are they impacting our survey?

Chris Rainey 11:13

You've done quite a lot of different outreach and communication, what would you say is the most effective communication strategy that worked the most for you?

Aneta 11:19

I would say there were actually two but we've got ourselves involved in what we call climate Fresco and organisation, it's worth looking into what they do. They do bring this to life, but actually organising internal workshops, with, with your employees really talking about, what does it mean? What does the change in our planet means? How does that impact you know, the actions we need to take? Because that also brings it to life? It's not something that's far far away, beautifully shown by David Attenborough, right towards what is happening to the planet, but that is far away. Sometimes it doesn't feel

Chris Rainey 11:58

what does it mean for Chris? Yeah, for me? Yeah. People feel like disconnected from it.

Aneta 12:04

So this is about bringing it to, you know, to what it means to us, right? How is it impacting us as individuals, and that helps to drive awareness? Because awareness, it really is moving from basic compliance to, to awareness so that people can really think about what are the actions actionable steps we can take and really embracing it? So I think that awareness building is really important for people to understand the bigger picture, but also, what does it mean? And how can we make a difference individually, the other aspects to our leaders and business sustainability programme, we have driven a lot of learning sessions. So again, it's part of learning. But so we invested quite a bit in storytelling. So how can we get comfortable talking about sustainability? Not as, again, a tagline or a buzzword that is very far away? But how is that relevant to our customers? How is relevant to our clients? How can we tell our own story about what we are doing around sustainability as an employer, this was really around around bringing this topic into a conversation and helping people get comfortable with it, understand it better, and then talk about it,

Chris Rainey 13:17

how did you share those, those videos or those stories.

Aneta 13:21

So we had, interestingly enough, this started happening through the pandemic. So we had the benefit of doing this in the pandemic in virtually means we had a we had a better reach, and we asked our, our our team members to submit their videos. So that was quite an we got quite creative, many creative ideas on on how to talk about how to talk about the sustainability around our customers, and, and people did show off, you know, their, their skills, whether whether they're wonderful skills of doing very engaging speeches, or very Crafty Crafty arts, that they could that they could put in the video. So we had, we created, let's say, safe, safe environment where anybody can test their ideas, people could share comments contribute. So we did share the videos across our our teams internally. When we were able to meet in offices, we also ran some face to face workshops, where where people could have almost a bit of like a Toastmasters experience, where again, you can have you can have a bit of a go and you can have input from your colleagues so you can refine your refine your your speech, your conversation and your articulation. So so we did couple of couple of events or stories around that. And we also have our programme around recognition. So we always have at least one one award culture dedicated to somebody who's done something specific around sustainability.

Chris Rainey 14:54

You're really weaving it into everything wherever you're looking at whether it's recognition or was learning, you have that sustainability lens that you're looking for all the time, as well. And I loved it, as you said storytelling, because that's the best way right, that people connect to, you mentioned the AI, a couple of different times. Talk about the connection between inclusion inclusive companies, and why that makes companies more sustainable, because that's something that when you first mentioned I'd hadn't come across love to love to hear more.

Aneta 15:25

It's really interesting that you know, the longer, you know, the longer we track this, the more data we have. And through our diversity inclusion belonging group, we have, we have looked at some of the statistics and either statistics from Business Consulting Group McKinsey World Economic Forum. And recently, you know, this talks about first of all, higher growth, which we kind of know about that companies that are more diverse, and especially with more diverse leadership teams, which is an important element, have higher growth, they're more innovative, take better decisions, actually. And one of the statistics is 87%. better decisions are taken across diverse companies in terms of sustainability, the I found few data points, but all of them, all of them are saying that if you have more than a third of women in leadership roles you have, at least I think the lowest number I have come across is 33%. I believe the highest is 36%, you will have between 33 and 36%, more sustainable strategy. So that's really interesting that this was specifically related to women in leadership positions, that that impacts a more sustainable agenda and more focused on sustainable development goals. But overall, you know, it's not just about having women in leadership positions, right. It's about having an inclusive leadership team. Yeah. So that you're actually embracing the different ideas, you're embracing the different thoughts, you're embracing the positive conflict in order to build something better. So yeah, certainly that was quite quite a realisation that how much does diversity and inclusion also impact the sustainable approach?

Chris Rainey 17:12

How has that shifted your own team's thinking and approach

Aneta 17:15

we want to make sure and I think this is what we discussed with our do X come over, over the last last few years, as we've all embraced our own diversity and inclusion, learning and journey, which is how do we ensure that we include different perspectives in when we're planning when we're discussing when we're thinking about something different, and maybe even tackling problems that we've had a challenge with for some time. So as part of this, and as part of our we're focusing on generations this year, so every year we have a bit of a lens in terms of a different aspect, different pillar of diversity. So this year, we're piloting next generation advisory board. And and we'd literally kicked that off last month. So we have invited our representatives of our millennials and generation Zed to be part of our shadow boards, to shadow us. And we've also asked them to look at three different business topics that are a challenge for us. And we've asked them to give their perspectives their ideas and, and give us solutions. So because we will never have as least as a leadership team, none of us representing those generations. So this is how we also need to need to learn and need to embrace the need to think about different plans.

Chris Rainey 18:44

That's really cool. I never come across that before. So building a next generation advisory boards, because they're going to be close to more connected and have different views and perspectives than you know, to your point as well. So wow, is that something you come across before that other companies have done or like, I've never come across that before?

Aneta 19:02

So I've heard there was a lot of the retail sector, Okay, last couple of years, I've come across some examples of what they called Shadow boards. So so it was maybe slightly different idea because there was literally shadowing all the different members of the of the board, but it was to gain different perspectives and the this has provided opportunities to really solve some some tactical but also some strategic topics. When you think about the the representation of our workforce, with millennials, I believe now are representing around 20, almost 30% of our workforce generations that about 8% by 2030 they will represent 60% of our workforce.

Chris Rainey 19:47

Wow, that's not that's not far away. Oh, no sign a colon though.

Aneta 19:54

and a half years from now. Oh, wow. Yeah, so it's not only about the next generation It's right. But we have to make sure that we're embracing them, you know, their world is very different. And we need to we need to listen, it's going to influence how how we work in the future. And the you know, the way of working now is very, very different, particularly after the pandemic, what people talk about what people want, what the next generation looks for, and looks at is again, you know, something we need to make sure we live up to as a company. One of the interesting, interesting research from from the attic business school, I really want to make sure I credit them for that is they talk about the three things that our you know, the next generations care about. And then one of the first things is, is environment, environment, inclusion, personal development. That's why when we talk about why sustainability so important for the people function to embrace is because this is really what's also important to to our future future hires to our future leaders to the talent that we need to attract into our business. And we better make sure we walk the talk because they will scrutinise with the social media presence, you will really have to make sure we are really embracing it, and there is no greenwashing there's no pink washing, there's no white washing that we're really mean when we say and and our actions are also are also demonstrating that this is what we're committed to

Chris Rainey 21:22

No, absolutely love it. And you have to look at it from every angle, like you said, internally, externally, your customers, your suppliers, everywhere and loads of develop areas that you mentioned in this podcast, which I never even thought of, until you mentioned them. And that's why you, you're doing an amazing job of asking people asking your employees that question, you know, rather than you having to sit and come up with all the ideas, they're gonna come to you, this is what we want, right. And guess what, they're gonna be way more excited about it, when they're involved in the process, and it's their idea, right, they're gonna, they're gonna have all their buy in all of their energy, as well, as opposed to always another HR initiative. Oh, it's another business thing. They're pushing down on us, as well. So I love the approach the unit team,

Aneta 22:06

and people will surprise you, people will surprise you. And, and that's why it's, it's important to listen and to get them involved. I want to another absolutely fascinating things that we were for the last few years in a row, we're celebrating the world Cleanup Day, which is usually the third Saturday of September, but we do have volunteering days to give to give back to the society. So recreate that activity on the Friday, before before the world cleanup day and every office organises their own activity. And again, this is something that we care about this is something that's meaningful, and and you only see how much it means to people by seeing the examples of what people choose to do. So it could be you know, cleaning up a local beach, for example, in Cork, it could be cutting down and cleaning up the park, you know, somewhere in London, or it could be as our, again, very innovative team in the Netherlands have come up with there is a There's a park and a lake next to our office. So they have invited those who have scuba licences to go dive into the pond to clean up the pond. That's amazing.

Chris Rainey 23:19

Dedication, yeah, I never would have thought of that one, right. And again, those are the moments that matter, right that people remember, when they think about a company they work for, they want to be proud of that company. And they're going to talk about it and share it and share the stories to your point. And that ripple effect of all of those actions is what shapes your culture, in the business, as well. So this is something that's owned by everyone in the business, not just not just HR, and the people team. Before I let you go. What would be your sort of number one piece of advice for HR leaders to undo on this journey,

Aneta 23:59

learn, learn and learn with the business, learn and lead maybe even even would be better because I think we often underestimate what role we have to play as the people organisation. We can lead this topic across the business. This is not just the people topic this touches everything that we do, how we communicate internally and externally. What conversations we we have with customers. So I really do believe that people in organisation leaders really have the skill set to embrace this topic and to actually lead it across the business. Learn learning is important and I guess that's part of the the culture that we need. Anyways, if we talk about sustainable organisation, we really need to embrace the learning, the lifelong learning and the learning mindset because our world around us is changing so fast and it's such a place now. So we need to be we need to keep up and we need to keep on top of it. So So my view is my view is learned engage are engage the teams for ideas so that they can co create the agenda with you. And this also includes customers, we should also be talking to customers about what are their challenges so that we can also build plans together. And lead be brave.

Chris Rainey 25:16

Amazing. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. I love what you're doing. Like clearly, we can hear and see your energy for as well and it really is making a difference and I wish you all the best until next week. Thanks so much.

Aneta 25:28

Wonderful. Thanks a lot, Chris.