November 08, 2022
How Banque Palatine wants to make telecommuting an element of its employer brand
"How Banque Palatine wants to make telecommuting an employer brand" is the title of the article published in the online media InfoRHSocial on September 13th, following the interview we had with Steve Caroff, HR Manager at Banque Palatine.
In order to support the implementation of telework within its company, Banque Palatine has chosen our BeeMyFlex solution in November 2021. After a first test phase, our application has been adopted.
In the summer of 2022, we interviewed Steve Caroff to understand how telecommuting was implemented in his organization. We share with you his answers and the experience of Banque Palatine. A great example of a company that has managed to become flex and equip itself to make this hybrid transition within its organization a strength.
Find the complete interview here :
Question 1: The development of teleworking has accelerated with the health crisis of 2020-2021. How have you approached this new way of working at Banque Palatine?
"The issue of telecommuting was already under consideration within the Bank
Palatine before the March 2020 health crisis. As early as 2018 the Bank had experimented with this form
of work organization with certain employees. But of course, telecommuting
in the spring of 2020, has had an accelerating effect on the Bank's thinking. As early as
In July 2020, an 18-month agreement was signed with the unions to expand the scope of the
the scope of application to almost all employees. If telework has been an obligation
during periods of containment, the Bank quickly realized that it was operating
a mutation of the forms of work and that framing it was necessary to make it last."
Question 2: What difficulties have you encountered in the implementation of
the hybrid organization of work within Banque Palatine?
"The main difficulty is to find the right position of the cursor with regard to the number of
days that can, and should, be teleworked. This is all the more true since Banque Palatine has
necessarily have to be present with its clients because of the nature of its business.
activity, but also sometimes business and regulatory constraints make it difficult to
or even impossible, to telework. It was therefore necessary to work with the trade unions and the employees,
to educate people on the principle that if telework is to be used as a means of
100% during the containment phases may have worked, but it was not a model for the
sustainable over the long term."
Question 3: You have chosen BeeMyFlex to manage your hybrid work organization and
you have been using it for nine months now. Why do you need a
such a solution? What are the benefits for you?
"Once the telecommuting agreement was agreed upon by all, we needed to have the tools to
propose to the employees, the update and the follow-up of their schedules, according to these new
work methods, i.e. face-to-face and distance learning. But also, for the company, in order to
be able to monitor this new organization and compliance with our agreement. The management tool of the
leave and other absences was used for a while. But the management of this type of
This is not its primary purpose, and the ergonomics were not up to par, both for our employees on a daily basis, and for the company in terms of monitoring and reporting. We were looking for
therefore a more flexible, intuitive and ergonomic tool.
So we explored other solutions and BeeMyflex quickly appeared in our
research. If we had to put in place one more "tool" for our employees, it would be
that both on the functionalities and on the time saving for the update, our collaborators
are winners. This is the case with the BeeMyFlex solution which is interfaced with our tool
management system that allows, thanks to its ergonomics and design, a quick update of the payroll.
and intuitive planning system. Now our 1,200 employees use it every day since
November 2021 and this choice seems to fit well with our model.""
Question 4: In the news, there is a lot of talk about the big resignation. Companies have
increasingly difficult to recruit. How does flexibility through telecommuting
is an asset for them and for you?
"The spring 2020 health crisis has undoubtedly had economic and
social. As far as the latter are concerned, the massive arrival of telework in companies has become
a kind of norm. And it is very frequent that this subject is now invited in the interviews
recruitment, where it hardly appeared until the year 2020. Having an organization
flexible work allowing telecommuting or working on remote sites is therefore a plus when
to attract new employees, or even to retain existing ones
present. And being able to propose a solution such as BeeMyFlex to accompany it is also
a plus."
Question 5: How do you see the evolution of the business model in the
What are the next few years? What are the new challenges?
"Telework undeniably has positive effects, if it is controlled and supervised. The spring
2020 has demonstrated that full-time, or self-paced, telecommuting rather than
choosing is not a positive thing. On the contrary, it is a source of rupture of the social link, it can also be
source of isolation or demotivation if the contribution of the work group is no longer present. The
The challenge will be to maintain the necessary flexibility, which will be just as beneficial to
to employees as well as to companies. Indeed, as the saying goes: "the happiness of some
It's not enough to be a good person, you have to be a good person". Thus, the flexibility provided to employees
must not be at the expense of the requirements that companies may have for their
collaborators. But the reverse is also true.
At Banque Palatine, after an initial 18-month agreement, we opted for a
new 12-month temporary agreement. The reason is very simple: over the period of application of
our first agreement, while we were able to learn a little about the practice of telecommuting, the conditions
did not allow us to test our system long enough due to the fact that
successive confinements and other recommendations of massive telecommuting that we have well
of course respected. With the improvement of the sanitary conditions, we can finally put in place a
We have been implementing the provisions of our agreement since March 2022. In 2023, we will learn from it
in order to negotiate, this time, an agreement that should be sustainable."
Question 6: It has been several months since the BeeMyFlex solution has been deployed at the
within Banque Palatine and used by all employees.
What is the first feedback from the field?
"Indeed, the solution was tested during our HR trials, before being deployed within the
Bank, starting in November 2021. The application seems to be well adapted for all, the taking in
hand is easy. With the integration of Zenpark Pro Flex in the app, employees can
easily reserve their parking spaces when they go to the office. The implementation of the application
seems to make it easier for everyone to get feedback and get organized."
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A big thank you to Steve Caroff from Banque Palatine for granting us this interview and sharing this enriching information about flex work.
Find this version of the interview in press release here : see the press release
See you soon for more flex sharing! 🚀✌