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Getting our people and organization ready for the future
Our employees will make our #inspire2022 strategy come true. That is why we create a challenging and inspiring work environment with great focus on diversity, collaboration and empowerment.
We will enable our existing and future employees to take ownership of their career by providing re-skilling and up-skilling in key domains to keep them relevant for today’s and tomorrow’s jobs while attracting the best digital talent. We aim to be recognized in the employment market as a talent builder for the digital world.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a defining moment for the telecom sector, underlining our societal responsibility. Thanks to the expertise, professionalism and dedication of our employees we could keep families and friends connected, enable people to work or study from home and help companies and organizations operate.
Re-skilling and up-skilling
We want to equip our employees with the skills they need to thrive in a fast-changing world. We create together with them the opportunity to continuously up-skill and develop, particularly in the digital field. We want to have the right skills in-house to lead the development of the digital economy and society of the future, and to assure the employability of our people. Re-skilling helps us to reorient employees and to grow in new future-oriented domains such as fiber.
For 2021 we have the ambition to have an average of 40 training hours per employee. By 2023, we will have invested € 100 million in training (including the time invested). Continuous learning and development are extremely important. Proximus prides itself in offering a wide range of training opportunities to support our employees to reach their full potential. This offer is regularly updated and expanded.
Training at Proximus in 2020
We invested € 34.45 million in employee re-skilling and up-skilling. Each employee took part in an average of 39.5 hours of training, aligned with our ambitions.
By 2023, € 100 million will be invested in training.
We focus on:
Getting the basics
“Getting the basics” is all about acquiring the most essential soft and digital skills for the future, covering creativity and innovation, network, cybersecurity, emotional intelligence and digital communication. In 2020, about 1,500 employees followed at least one module in the “getting the basics” program.
In 2021, training will be expanded to include customer experience, data analytics and emerging technologies.
Staying relevant in the current job
We offer our employees challenging and ambitious learning tracks to up-skill in fields that are critical to stay relevant in their job.
Examples of specific training tracks include: • New technologies: 5G and fiber for technicians, followed by 1,300 employees in 2020. • Multilevel and longitudinal learning paths on multiple subjects: cloud, fiber, data management and engineering, voice of the customer. In 2020, 3,755 employees followed one of these trainings. In 2021-2022, a classroom training offer will be launched for splicers, technicians, call center agents and sales in the shops to raise their level in crucial skills.
We foster partnerships to reach our ambition. In 2020 our partner Technobel developed a unique dual learning track for fiber splicers. This will be of benefit to Proximus, given our ambition to build the best gigabit network by 2022.
Building the future
We organize corporate programs focusing on strategic skills, helping our employees to prepare for the next step in their career. In 2020, we launched five intensive multilevel re-skilling tracks for cloud, data, cyber security, network development and user experience. Most of them come with a training certification.
In 2021, new waves of the five re-skilling tracks will be launched and partnerships will be set up to offer re-skilling programs to more employees.
Internal mobility
We encourage internal mobility, as we want to ensure that all employees benefit from continuous learning and do a job that matches their talents. Together with the restructuring plan, agreed end 2019 and implemented in 2020, this led to an exceptional high number of internal job changes. In 2020, 2,146 employees changed jobs internally (519 employees in 2019).
Attracting the best talent
In 2020, despite the COVID-19 crisis, Proximus recruited more than 200 employees in domains of the future for roles like data analysts, UX designers, IT analysts, enterprise architects and more. In 2021, we will focus on targeted recruitment in critical domains. To help us do that, we founded KUBIC with other top employers in Belgium.
KUBIC: nurturing the talent of the future
In November 2020, Proximus joined with Colruyt Group, Deloitte, KBC, Nalantis and Ravago to launch the Knowledge University Business Integrated Challenge (KUBIC). This initiative brings together companies, students and universities to encourage knowledge sharing and networking. KUBIC is an open platform, accessible to all companies and to students from all universities. With the number of vacancies expected to grow in Belgium in the coming decade, the aim of this innovative platform is to strengthen the position of all companies involved in the competition for talent by connecting them through KUBIC. The potential target audience is approximately 40,000 students.
Transforming the way we work
To get our organization ready for the future and make a real shift to a truly customer-centric digital company, Proximus will gradually transform into a network of cross-functional, diverse and empowered teams driven by a shared purpose and supported by a strong company culture. This transformation requires deep cultural change. In 2021 we will strengthen our efforts with a continued focus on leadership at all levels of the company.
Good to Gold culture
Our company culture, known as “Good to Gold”, is composed of two important elements: The growth mindset; having a growth mentality means that you believe in life-long learning. The second important element is our values: collaboration, accountability, agility, customer centricity and digital mindset. The way we act, the way we behave, will always be guided by our values. Our values combined with a growth mentality allow us to make a difference.
We leave our siloed way of working behind and are implementing a transversal way of executing our work. In 2020, we launched Steam, a project to improve the servicing experience for our customers through the set-up of multi-disciplinary teams.
These teams combine customer service agents with complementary skills, collaborating day-to-day to provide end-to-end service to the customers. Their mission? To make life easier for the customers and provide first time right solutions.
We started with the first three teams, for residential, small enterprises and large companies, in 2020 and we will further increase the number of multi-disciplinary teams in 2021 to reach more customers.
In 2020, so-called Good2Gold Lean Teams were formed, together representing a total of 900 employees. The aim is to instill a culture of continuous improvement in order to increase our efficiency and to improve the dynamics of the teams.
In 2021, we will continue to roll-out new agile teams and improve our processes in order to reduce the time to launch new products and services and to increase customer experience.
Digital workplace
We want autonomous and effective collaboration to take center stage, where information is shared openly and efficiently.
This is why we offer our employees a coherent set of user-friendly and secure digital tools that can be used on any device. Our digital office tools allow employees to maximize their own personal efficiency and facilitate collaboration with others. • In the summer of 2020, we rolled out Microsoft Teams.
It also allows us to collaborate more easily with partners, suppliers and customers.
• Our new fully multilingual collaborative intranet platform (WAP+) was launched at the end of 2020 to stimulate connections among employees, informal cross-team collaboration and knowledge sharing.
• We launched our Spencer app, developed to give internal
Proximus employees access to their holidays, absences and team calendar on their mobile device.
• We also launched two apps for digital support to our employees: Ada for IT questions and Yoda for HR questions.
Building the workplace of the future
In a changing and challenging context, the moment to reinvent the workspace is now. We want to evolve towards an inspiring digital hub connected to a national network of spaces enabling to work smarter, built to foster connection, collaboration and innovation.
Due to COVID-19, overnight almost 85% of our own employees found themselves working remotely. Thanks to our investments in the past years in establishing a digital workplace, we were able to easily cope with the sudden switch in our way of working.
The pandemic was an opportunity to rethink the way we work, taking into account what we have learned from this crisis: review the balance between face-to-face and teleworking, work more intelligently and ensure that our decisions are taken with environmental considerations in mind.
A new collective agreement
In October 2020, we have concluded a new innovative collective agreement with the trade unions. In line with our #inspire2022 strategy this agreement focuses on a more sustainable and innovative way of working.
Our new agreement strives to find a new balance between telework and working in the office – even post-COVID-19. A balance that works for the employees and for Proximus. This means only going to the office when there is a clear benefit such as co-creative meetings, connecting with the team, activities needing physical presence or because we feel a personal need to do so.
Employees can now work up to three days per week at home compared to two days previously and are given the possibility to completely go offline outside working hours. We also launched a flexible mobility platform that gives our employees the freedom to choose the mobility solution that suits them best (for example, car, train or bike) and reduces everybody’s ecological footprint.
Finally, we will focus more than ever on training and we will strengthen our principles of equality, diversity and inclusion.
Proximus diversity and inclusion statement is disclosed in the Consolidated Management Report on page 306.
A new workspace vision at Proximus
We want to instill a new dynamic, where each colleague selects the optimal workspace to execute their work, depending on the activities and level of interaction needed (at home, in a regional office, or in Brussels). Our future spaces must go beyond a simple physical workspace and allow us to work smarter, collaborate and innovate while also being a source of inspiration and contact between colleagues.
To support this vision, we will investigate the best scenario to create a greener “campus-like” building in Brussels that is smaller and better suited to collaboration, formal and informal contacts. At the same time, this project will enable us to significantly reduce our carbon footprint while benefiting from a favorable financial impact. This new environment must above all reflect our culture: more customer-centric, more horizontal, more open, more networked and part of the local community.
Being our best selves at work
We strive to create a positive work environment. Where people feel good and feel valued. Where working conditions are adapted to personal needs for a better work-life balance in sync with the company’s ambitions. Where employees are resilient, engaged and making a positive contribution to our company growth.
Wellbeing at work
At Proximus, social consultants and prevention advisors support employees in different domains of psychosocial wellbeing at work.
Under normal circumstances, we offer our employees services through our Work Life Unit such as childcare during summer and spring holidays. We also organize a Fun Day and a Kids Party for all our employees and their families each year. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, family days and childcare during school holidays could not be organized in 2020 and were substituted by other initiatives.
With our FeelGreat@Proximus program we aim to foster a culture of physical, social and mental resilience. This includes workshops, events, brochures and communication campaigns.
Safety and wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic
We developed multiple initiatives to protect and support our employees during the COVID-19 crisis. Detailed information can be found in the pages “Our response to COVID-19 pandemic”.
