The health crisis profoundly disrupted working practices, particularly within companies whose teams are spread across several countries. How did HR functions navigate this transition? How did they maintain team cohesion and preserve company culture despite the distance? Emna Abdellah, HR Director at Expensya, shared her experience during a webinar co-organised with Klara, offering concrete insight into the levers that made a real difference.
Expensya: an international organisation facing the challenge of lockdown
Multi-location teams put to the test of isolation
Founded in 2015, Expensya was structured from its earliest days with an international mindset: the company has teams in France, Germany and Tunisia. This configuration, a genuine asset in normal times, complicated the management of lockdown in March 2020. The isolation of employees, often integrated into relatively small teams, was amplified by the geographical distance that already existed.
Faced with this operational reality, Expensya's HR teams adopted a two-stage approach: observe first, then act accordingly. This structured method made it possible to better target the real needs of employees before deploying tailored solutions.
Observing to act more effectively: two profiles of response to isolation
The observation phase revealed two types of reaction across teams.
On one side, developers managed to recreate their working environment fairly easily and noted no significant change in their day-to-day lives. On the other, Sales and Support teams required more support. These employees, accustomed to daily human contact, needed help recreating an environment conducive to their wellbeing.
This distinction allowed Expensya's HR team to adapt their response to each team's specific reality, rather than applying a uniform solution to markedly different situations.
HR at the heart of crisis management
Managers as relays, tools as levers
Managing the distance between employees, organising the return to the office without reliable visibility, and accounting for health protocols specific to each country: these were just some of the challenges Expensya's HR teams had to manage simultaneously.
At Expensya, Emna Abdellah relied on managers to maintain the link with each employee, given that HR could not ensure individual follow-up at the scale of the whole organisation. Managers played a structural relay role, which contributed to strengthening company culture in a context of team fragmentation.
As Expensya's activity did not pause, recruitment and the integration of new hires also had to continue. Integration processes were formalised and simplified in collaboration with managers. Tools were deployed for this purpose: AirCall was notably integrated to digitalise telephone calls and centralise the associated data.
Maintaining company culture despite the distance
With changes happening so rapidly, there was a real risk of seeing company culture erode. Employee engagement, particularly sensitive during prolonged remote working, remained a priority for HR teams.
Internal management training sessions were organised to help managers support their teams through this unprecedented context. Reading materials were also made available to assist them in this day-to-day support role.
Careful monitoring of the balance between professional and personal life was put in place to prevent psychosocial risks. To reinforce the sense of belonging, year-end gifts were sent directly to employees regardless of their country. Regular exchange sessions, team building activities such as "off-site managers" events and team breakfasts completed this programme, maintaining cohesion at a distance. The goal: to ensure that all employees, wherever they were, had the same level of knowledge of the company and were asked for the same level of commitment.
Tools to create value, in service of human connection
Going digital without losing sight of what matters
Digital tools played a structural role in crisis management. But as Emna Abdellah made clear: a tool must save time, on the condition that the time saved is reinvested in creating added value. Technology does not replace human connection; it liberates it.
An onboarding tool was for example put in place at Expensya. The results were measurable: the response rate proved higher in virtual format than in person, with an identical satisfaction rate. A concrete result that illustrates that digitalisation, when well executed, can improve the employee experience without degrading it.
Klara to structure and strengthen talent management
It is in this spirit that Expensya integrated Klara into its talent management approach. The tool provides a precise and detailed understanding of what employees know how to do: technical skills and behavioural skills are mapped and centralised, giving the HR Director a global overview of available talent.
This visibility on skills facilitates several concrete HR decisions: identifying possible career paths for each employee, repositioning a profile whose role is evolving, or carrying out a precise matching between a role to be filled and the internal resources available. Managing this monitoring in paper or spreadsheet format would be neither sustainable nor effective in a growing organisation with diverse areas of expertise. The tool decentralises this type of process whilst making data more reliable and decisions better informed.
Removing geographical barriers to find talent
The management of the health crisis confirmed a trend that Expensya had anticipated long before lockdown: professional nomadism. The premise is simple: an employee performs better in an environment they understand and know. That is why Expensya operates on the principle that a sales professional who is a native of a country will be more effective operating in their own country, whatever their scope of action.
This approach also opens up new perspectives in terms of recruitment. By removing geographical constraints, it becomes possible to identify talent anywhere in the world. The only determining criterion is competence, not location. If a company needs a technology expert and the ideal profile is based in London, it must be in a position to recruit them and support them where they are.
Preserving company culture in a world without borders
This model represents a genuine opportunity for organisations wishing to broaden their pool of potential talent. It does, however, require constant vigilance over company culture. Operating everywhere in the world must not come at the cost of collective identity.
At Expensya, this means establishing common foundations: making English the shared working language, for example, guarantees consistent global operation across the organisation. The initiatives tested by HR teams during successive lockdowns helped to clarify what works and what needs to be adjusted in order to build a working model that is genuinely adapted to companies and their employees.
