With close to 100,000 employees spread across nearly 90 countries, Sanofi is a true biopharma giant. And, according to Head of Digital Employee Experience Zaidan, the company’s predominance of tech-savvy young people makes for particularly interesting work.
“The biggest challenge is to try to bring the internal experience of our employees to the same level as their expectations in the outside world,” Zaidan says. “They want the same quality of experience they’re used to with the Amazons, the Ubers and the Deliveroos of this world. And, as we all know, companies’ internal systems sometimes don’t match such high expectations.”
Retaining people through the right culture and experience.
For Zaidan, employee experience is a vital matter. “In my view, the two central issues are attractiveness and retention,” Zaidan says. “First, we have to make people want to come to our companies, attracted by flexibility, growth, and opportunities for change. And then we need to retain them through providing the right culture and experience. That’s where Workday fits in at Sanofi.”
Zaidan is quick to emphasize the essential role that Workday has to play in both areas. “For more than 10 years we’ve had Workday at the heart of our digital transformation,” Zaidan says. “And now we’ve recently implemented the AI-powered Workday Career Hub, rather like a kind of internal Tinder that connects everybody’s skills as employees with development opportunities—from short-term gigs to full-time jobs. Since the implementation of Career Hub, our employees have filled an amazing 7,600 assignments. In fact, we are a Premium Partner of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games—and when we posted a gig about this, we received no fewer than 10,000 applications from our people.”
Workday Career Hub is a fantastically powerful new tool that’s making the experience of work better for everyone.
Head, Digital Employee Experience
Creating a personalized guide for every employee.
The introduction of Workday Career Hub is already having an important positive impact on people’s working lives at Sanofi. As Zaidan explains, “Prior to implementation, we carried out a major research exercise among employees, including a deep-dive questionnaire with 700 people, followed up with interviews.
“Our research showed that their priorities were very much in line with those of HR: to support them in their personal and professional development, promote well-being at work, and advance Sanofi in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“Now, with Career Hub, our people are invited to provide information on their professional background, skills and talents, interests, and career plans,” Zaidan adds. “Workday AI analyzes all this data, interacting with individuals to specify certain aspects of their profile before submitting proposals setting out a development path to a future role or profession.
“So once it’s been properly validated, Career Hub provides a personalized guide for every employee, including a list of the skills they need to acquire and consolidate along the way, and the actions they need to take,” Zaidan continues. “It’s a fantastically powerful new tool that’s making the experience of work better for everyone.”
AI is making unconscious bias a thing of the past.
Zaidan illustrates the benefits of Workday Career Hub by telling the story of a Sanofi colleague, Sarah. “One day, Sarah was telling me at the coffee machine about how she was looking for somebody to help her analyze a lot of data in a Microsoft Excel file,” Zaidan says. “She was delighted when I told her about Career Hub, and how it could help in exactly that way.
“Then,” Zaidan continues, “I saw Sarah again a few weeks later, and she was with a new team member called Ali. She’d found him through Career Hub for this one-off gig, and then hired him full time when she realized how much his skills were needed in her team.”
AI also helps the hiring process by stripping out everything but the most important facts to help recruiters and job seekers alike make the right choices. “Basically, Career Hub uses an algorithm to look only at a person’s competences without cognitive bias,” Zaidan says. “This ensures that the recruiter isn’t distracted by irrelevant factors, protecting us against any unconscious gender or origin bias.”
Zaidan also highlights the sheer scale of new support that Career Hub is making available to managers. “We’ve assessed that more than 350,000 hours of work are now accessible for the first time, a massive resource that’s greatly strengthening the internal resources managers can access.”
I believe that AI and Gen AI will completely change the way we work, unleashing the productivity of every employee.
Head, Digital Employee Experience
Unleashing the productivity of every employee.
Zaidan is confident that Career Hub is fulfilling an essential need at Sanofi that will make the company yet more successful over the years ahead.
“It’s the latest addition to what I see as the magic triangle that links function with the simplification of data analysis and digital technology,” Zaidan says. “Technology isn’t the only answer—the key is to make these three things work together in a way that works for employees and the business as a whole.”
Zaidan is particularly excited by the vision of an AI-empowered future that Career Hub is helping to open up. “I believe that AI and Gen AI will completely change the way we work, unleashing the productivity of every employee.
“And it’s the help that Workday has given us in preparing for the future that’s most important to us, continuously enriching its processes through the vast community of clients and shared experiences.”