Transavia, a low-cost airline in the Air France-KLM Group, offers regular medium-haul flights and charters at highly competitive prices, departing from France and the Netherlands. It has around 1,160 employees with 250 seasonal contracts each year during the summer period.
Challenges
Offer the same level of service to its employees as to its customers
Transavia has started to tackle the digitalisation of its HR processes, based on the realisation that the employee experience must be on a par with the customer experience. ‘We currently have a very high level of digitisation within the company as customers are already benefiting from digital services like electronic ticketing, finding practical information and so on… We therefore wanted to offer our staff the same level of service that we offer our customers’, explains Laetitia Joly.
At Transavia, management very quickly understood the benefits of digitalisation. Offering an employee experience (‘we make our staff feel good’) on the same level as its customer promise (‘we make low cost feel good’) has become one of its priorities. This project was initiated by HR management with the primary objective of convincing the employees. Laetitia Joly emphasises the importance of positive communication and internal evangelisation: "I was absolutely convinced of the benefits of digitalisation and assumed that this project would be a success. It's important to involve the staff in an adventure of this kind and it is by doing so that I managed to convince the members of my team." »
The HR challenge: productivity and data protection
Transavia has some 1,160 employees and 250 seasonal contracts each year during the summer period. The Payroll & Personnel Administration department led by Laetitia Joly has 5 members of staff on permanent contract and 2 trainees. The company wanted to implement an HR digitisation solution in order to address two issues:
Data security: ‘We needed to secure the sending of our pay slips, which until now had been managed by members of our department: in-house printing, enveloping and franking. It was necessary for us to secure this process, all the more so with the implementation of the Deduction at Source and questions of confidentiality concerning deduction rates and salary slips’, explains Laetitia July.
Managing HR administrative processes in a context of strong growth: ‘We are lucky enough to experience workforce growth of around 17% per year. But we did not want to increase the size of our HR staff. We wanted to use digitisation to eliminate time-consuming tasks and focus on those offering high added value’, she adds.
Transavia benefits from the collaboration between Cegid and UKG
Transavia has been using Cegid's HRPI software since 1 January 2015. ‘When we decided to digitise our HR department, Cegid immediately suggested UKG. UKG’s solution is integrated into the Cegid portal and to go with these two players was therefore the obvious thing to do from a technical and practical point of view. Following a careful selection process, UKG was also chosen by our parent company, Air France, which reinforced our choice. For us, this was a guarantee of quality’, explains Laetitia Joly.
Transavia has kept the same contacts and the same entry point, while at the same time benefiting from a dedicated project manager at UKG. ‘I've had the same contacts since the outset and this is very reassuring. Moreover, the collaboration between Cegid and UKG is smooth and efficient’, affirms Laetitia.
Project implementation: 3 modules to breathe new life into HR
‘We are finally able to offer HR services that meet the expectations of our employees’, says Laetitia Joly. Within a few months, several modules have been put in place:
1. Electronic payslips & Employee Vault:
Employees benefit from a personal digital vault in which they receive payslips and other HR documents, such as contracts and contract amendments, which they can consult at any time. They can also take advantage of 10 GB of space – free of charge – for the secure storage of personal documents.
2. eSignature:
The electronic signing of contracts and amendments was the second module to be implemented by Transavia. ‘Employees no longer have to turn up to headquarters to sign their documents: from now on, they sign electronically as 80% of our workforce are crew and by definition spend much of their time flying. Now they can sign their documents anywhere and anytime. Similarly on the HR side, today I'm giving this interview outside our premises and yet I can sign a document remotely if needed. As a result, our deadlines are always respected. We have also extended the electronic signature to our other HR processes and signed employer and work certificates’, says Laetitia.
3. UKG Document Manager:
Today, employee files and hiring records at Transavia are no longer in paper format. All of them are now available on the UKG platform in digital format. "We really follow the employee's journey digitally from entry to exit," explains Laetitia Joly.
Communication: the key to driving change
One month: this is the minimum legal period for informing employees about the implementation of digitalisation of their payslips. It is also the time it took for the UKG and Cegid teams to implement these solutions at Transavia. ‘The project itself was extremely quick’.
Transavia decided to launch a communication campaign to accompany the employees during this transition to the digital era. With the help of UKG, the HR team set up a comprehensive information and communication programme. ‘We sent out a number of bulletins. We went to meet our employees: at headquarters, in our flight preparation rooms, etc... UKG helped us in our approach by participating in workshops for the ESC (Economic and Social Committee) and employees to answer their questions. Ultimately, their questions were simple and legitimate: What is a digital vault? Does an electronic signature have the same evidential value as a paper document?’, explains Laetitia Joly.
The change management was successfully implemented. ‘We had to address the employees' concerns; sometimes the only obstacle is the force of habits. We wanted to reassure the staff about HR digitisation. No, it won't be the end of all human contact, quite the opposite!’ says Laetitia Joly.
‘We can now focus on tasks that offer high added value and strengthen our relationships with employees. This digitisation project has helped raise the status of all the team members' work in the eyes of the employees.'
Laetitia Joly
Payroll Manager & Personnel Administration
Results
Immediate results
For Transavia, the results were immeditate. The HR teams have been able to absorb the company's growth without increasing the number of HR staff: "We have even gained time to concentrate on other projects," says Laetitia Joly.
The company is seeing a vault activation rate of more than 95%. Only 14% of employees continue to receive paper payslips. ‘We also signed more than 1,500 contracts and amendments electronically in 2018. These are pretty respectable figures!’ adds Laetitia Joly.
While Transavia has seen an increase in HR productivity of more than 33% and a reduction in the cost of managing HR documents, the company has also been able to secure its HR processes and respond effectively to the issue of personal data protection and document retention. "We were able to easily comply with the GDPR thanks to the implementation of digital document management and save precious time" confirms Laetitia.
Transavia is now devoting this precious time to its employees and to key issues, as Laetitia Joly explains: ‘We can now focus on high value-added tasks and strengthen our relationships with our employees. This digitisation project has helped to raise the status of all the team members' work in the eyes of the employees’. »
The electronic signature in action
‘One day, operational management called us in a panic, saying that a crew member had been called in at extremely short notice to ensure that a flight could go ahead. The problem was that a contract absolutely had to be drawn up and signed so that the staff member could be operational by the crack of dawn the following day... It was already 5pm. Only a short while before, this would not have been possible. Naturally, we wouldn’t take the risk of having an employee fly without a work contract. The only solution would have been to mobilise the HR team for a good chunk of the evening and then turn up on the tarmac to have the employee sign the contract.
With HR digitisation, nothing could be easier! The contract is drawn up and validated, we sign it electronically, deposit it in the UKG portal and – for the sake of human contact – ring the employee, who receives an e-mail and code by mobile phone. In two clicks the contract is signed and our worries are over. The crew member can fly the next day with complete confidence!’, explains Laetitia.
Destination: all digital
Reassured that digitisation has an integral part to play in the HR landscape, Transavia embarked on the digitisation of its HR services and now intends to continue along this path. After implementing a range of UKG solutions, the company is turning its attention to other digitisation projects, as Laetitia Joly explains: ‘We will continue to automate internal tasks with the help of Cegid and to develop all our administrative employee processes. For example, we will enable the digital generation of new certificates in order to meet our employees' needs even more quickly and easily. We will also tackle our internal KPIs: we want to analyse our data, our activity, employee perception, performance, etc. The idea is to digitise all our HR processes’.
