Agile People: Sodexo México Case

There are experiences that simply fill your heart. Working with the People Sodexo Mexico team (now called Pluxee) has been one of the most wonderful experiences I’ve had, helping a team become the best version of themselves. Together with #Inteec, we proudly share what has happened. But how did we achieve it?

Background at Sodexo

The team was eager to start working differently. We arrived with a team of nine people, several of whom had only recently joined the team a few months or weeks before. The challenge? Leveraging agility as a means to help the team consolidate and, at the same time, generate changes in several of its deliverables/processes for employees.

How do we start?

Using highly collaborative and participatory sessions, we began by having conversations about where the team saw itself, where it wanted to be, its strengths, and pain points. We also held touchpoints with collaborators to understand their visions and needs: we wanted to design a strategy that came from people.

How did we organise at Sodexo?

The coaching effort involved 10 hours a week on my part for six months, and we sought to maximize value generation while being realistic about the team’s potential commitment and workload. Thus, the strategy consisted of:

• We relied on a coaching-mentoring format of weekly sessions with members of each area (e.g., the recruitment team, payroll team) with a single focus: selecting challenges and real work that needed to be improved. Thus, the fundamental strategy consisted of applying Lean-Agile principles to Business as Usual.
• In parallel, we chose a cross-functional project where the entire team could participate, such as the onboarding process.
• In addition, we created a weekly learning space where the entire team learned about topics such as Agile People, Scrum, OKRs, market practices, and other topics of interest.
• As we progressed, we established other types of spaces such as Weeklys, Retrospectives, and team sessions.

The average dedication of each person on the team, per week, was approximately 3 hours.

What we worked on at Sodexo

Some of the projects/products we worked on at Sodexo were:

• JIRA for Selection and optimization of the process internally.
• Consolidation of Onboarding by People.
• Detecting training needs with a more collaborative approach: holding sessions where employees participate, not just managers deciding on training.
• Streamlining the Quality of Life Committee.
• Optimizing payroll processes.
• Using Design Thinking to create co-creation spaces with employees.
• Lean principles to mitigate bottlenecks within the department.
• Clarity in success indicators and metrics.
• Adoption of certain practices such as weekly reports to synchronize internally.
• Minimum Viable Scorecard as a department.
• Establishment of FY23 Objectives with bottom-up and top-down value indicators and metrics.

¿What results did we get at Sodexo México?

We can highlight all kinds of results, such as:

• NPS of 92% of candidates regarding satisfaction with the selection process and a 4.3/5 rating for the selections carried out.
• Consolidation of onboarding from the first day, with a satisfaction rating of 4.83/5.
• They had a perception of an inadequate workload. In 4 months, this perception improved by 26%.
• Optimizing processes, improving response times to employee questions, such as:
• Reducing response time for savings account inquiries. Reduction from 4 hours per week to 1 hour.
• Inquiries related to vacation and administrative days. Previously, it took 10 minutes to manage each request, now 3 minutes.
• Automating promotion offer letters, from 25 minutes to now 10 minutes.
  • Reduce response time for savings account inquiries. Reduced from 4 hours per week to 1 hour.
  • Vacation and administrative leave inquiries. Previously 10 minutes to process each request, now 3 minutes.
  • Automated promotion offer letters, previously 25 minutes, now 10 minutes.
• Time spent on non-value-generating operational tasks was reduced, such as generating automatic organizational charts: from 8 hours to 1 hour. Time was freed up for payroll workers to improve the employee experience.
• Democratizing the communication process to ensure information flows more organically. Before: 90% of communications were issued solely by Communications, and 10% by Departments using the corporate social network. Now: Communications 66% and Departments 34%.
• On a qualitative level: there was an increase in the cohesion of the People team, a greater sense of belonging, a sense of being a team, among others. The valuable thing about this is that it was the people themselves who conveyed it as such, experienced it, and expressed it.

¿And the key to success at Sodexo?

I think that something key to developing the potential of this team has been given by 5 major factors:

• Working with the team’s EVERYDAY challenges, doing the same work differently. We didn’t want “agility” to be seen as an extra burden.
• Psychological Safety: the feeling of being able to be yourself on this team and being able to think out loud is incredible!
• Cultivating a mindset of continuous improvement with a focus on the system, beyond the individual.
• Leadership from the Director and Managers gave team members a lot of confidence and freedom.
• Space for reflection: without reflection and pause, there is no improvement. And as Lean says: let the people doing the work be the ones who propose how to do it better!

Finally, I am deeply grateful for the team’s trust and for everything we learned together. I would also like to extend a huge thank you to the Inteec team for all their support during this opportunity.

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