Human Resources Strategy

An essential role, when you consider that the company earns nearly three quarters of its business revenue abroad and seventy five percent of employees are based outside of France. The make-up of the top management team illustrates this importance, with one third of Executive Committee members originating from non French-speaking countries. At Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies, we do not regard diversity of cultures and origins as an obstacle to communication or to the corporate esprit de corps; on the contrary, we consider it an asset. We need such diversity to put into perspective the problems we encounter and to cover the entire scope of possible solutions. The resulting mode of organisation and operation is necessarily imprinted with mutual respect and open-mindedness.

No. We recruit just as many beginners as experienced individuals. It is true however, that we try to the greatest possible extent to identify candidates very early on, via internships or civil-service volunteers in France (VIE), simply because it takes time to acquire a genuine understanding of our businesses. But once the first step is over, some newcomers can quickly be faced with major challenges, potentially opening up prospects for fast promotion. It is not infrequent to see a person with a 2-year experience in the company be offered an expatriate assignment to a major construction project. And within a couple more years, that person can be in high responsibility position.

The entire management team shares the conviction that offering every one challenges in line with their potential is the best way to blend corporate interest with personal interest over the long term. And geographic mobility offers a myriad of such diversified challenges. Hence, encouraging and supporting geographic mobility is not just a goal for Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies, it is a necessity! And this is true at all hierarchical levels of responsibility.

Numerous tools exist, first and foremost our Intranet site which provides an ideal way to inform candidates about mobility and to available positions, thanks in particular to its interconnection with the Veolia Environnement site. Other tools are more related to the realm of interpersonal, individual or collective issues. They are designed to stimulate and facilitate networking between all corporate HR departments and to conduct regular personnel reviews.

Together with Veolia Water and Veolia Environnement, we share the same forward-looking vision of Human Resources management... a visibility we enjoy thanks to the large size of the Group, its international dimension and the complementarity of its businesses. A complementarity expressed at Veolia Environnement level by a common denominator across our businesses (Water, Waste, Energy, Transport), namely the will to contribute to enhancing our environment and living conditions. As such, mobility is not just a key component of corporate HR policy on a Group-wide scale, but also a clearly stated requirement shared by all companies.

Yes. Business complementarity is even more obvious within a given division. In the water business, a whole panel of jobs are related to activities of services and delegated management, complementary to our approach as builder and developer of technological solutions. These businesses are closely interlinked, even embedded into each other, since all of them consist of working on the water cycle. However, they do not share the same time scale which for an operator is around 10 years or more, based on contracts. As a builder, the time scale is more generally in the range of 2 to 3 years, and even shorter (6 to 12 months) as solution provider (standardized or semi-standardized systems), meaning that you have to be constantly on the lookout to anticipate market requirements and multiply the number of projects.

We define ourselves as "Creators of Water Solutions", and this term has real meaning. It refers to qualities such as inventiveness, initiative, entrepreneur spirit, as well as to a whole series of technical skills derived from technical education (process engineering, hydraulics, chemistry, biology, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, etc.) all of which can lead to a genuine expert career in the water industry. There is no such thing as a typical professional path, but you could imagine for instance starting with processes or engineering, before moving on to more commercial functions, and ending up in a high-responsibility management position within a subsidiary.

Although the proportion of engineers among our workforce is higher than the average in industrial companies, I wouldn't say that this is the only profile of interest to us. For example, we attach a lot of importance to administrative and financial skills, with a focus on management control and legal functions. Similarly, while we tap the reservoir of young engineering graduates, we however do not neglect applications from experienced engineers looking for new challenges or new professional sectors. Whether young or old, all newcomers quickly feel part of the family thanks to the HR team's ability to guide them and support their integration.