Adecco success story

Transforming the global compensation process, 100% remotely

The Adecco Group, a Fortune Global 500 company, is the world’s largest human resources provider and temporary staffing firm. With more than 5,200 branches in more than 60 countries across five continents, The Adecco Group offers a wide variety of services that include temporary staffing, permanent placement, career transition, re-skilling and talent development, as well as outsourcing and consulting.

Challenge

Automating Total Compensation

Adecco was managing its global salary review and variable compensation processes using a custom developed solution that had become obsolete and required a lot of manual effort to manage.

In the summer of 2019, the company began a search for a new compensation management system that would provide an intuitive and efficient portal for HR, managers and employees, to provide:

• Access to compensation data all year long
• Better visibility to managers and HR on their teams’ compensation
• Automated and efficient compensation processes
• Global standardization with local flexibility
• Better governance and compliance
• Strong simulation and analytics capabilities for HR, Finance, Accounting and Tax roles
• Excellent user experience

From a technical standpoint, the solution needed to meet Adecco’s defined criteria of being a true SaaS cloud solution, highly secure, scalable, and accessible from anywhere.

Solution

From start to launch in less than five months

The first phase was to implement the annual salary review process for 9,000 employees in France The project was ambitious from the start. To avoid disrupting the annual salary review process in April, the company committed to delivering a new platform for all managers and employees by February of 2020, less than five months later.

“At that time,” remembers Romain Debroize, Compensation and Benefits Manager at The Adecco Group, France, “we didn’t imagine that we would be confined [due to COVID-19] and forced to run the project completely remotely.”

Adecco’s Lyon, France-based team started working remotely from as early as October 2019, due to local transportation strikes. From the beginning of the selection process, face-to-face meetings were limited to the steering committee, outlining the important phases of the project.

To implement the project, Adecco chose Polarys, a beqom Strategic Technical Partner, who could bring dual functional HR and technical skill sets, to match Adecco’s business needs with the capabilities of its chosen system.

“After surveying the market, we found that beqom was clearly the best solution to automate our total remuneration processes,” says Audrey Vissac, Director of Compensation and Benefits at The Adecco Group, France. “We [were] convinced that beqom will enable us to stay true to our vision that people should be inspired, motivated, and developed to embrace the future of work, starting with our own employees.”

Working remotely from the start, Adecco had built a project team combining internal business and IT expertise, supported by a committed management team to be able to assess, decide and advance.

Like any major system implementation, the project was not easy, with critical choices of design and architecture, the proper understanding and translation between business and IT, the quality of the historical data to load, the preparation of initialization data, and tests all before the February deadline.

“We naturally had some concerns about working remotely, the inertia it can sometimes engender, but in hindsight, the entire project team was very efficient,” says Debroize. “We have met all our objectives.”

Benefits

Running smoothly, running remotely

“Today, in April 2020, we are in the midst of lockdown AND in the middle of an HR review period. Our platform works perfectly even when working remotely and is totally secure!” remarks Debroize. “In a context such as the current pandemic, it is a good sign for our group to be able to hold its salary review process to be ready for the post-lockdown rebound.”

Throughout the salary review process, the beqom solution has not overloaded or saturated the Adecco infrastructure, which is very much in demand in this period of remote connection. In addition, the beqom solution is directly connected to Adecco’s payroll system, which runs throughout the year, updated in particular by the processes and reorganizations in the management hierarchy.

“Completely remotely, the beqom solution allows us to operate 100%, without any additional cost, loss of performance or security risk,” says Debroize. “[In a lockdown,] our managers and employees have improved their productivity and reliability.”