The European accounting departments of this company, all centralised in one country, had to be eliminated elsewhere. In France, BPI helped the employees concerned by this change redefine their professional evolution within the company.

Context
New European Organisation
This company manufactures cutting-edge telecommunications equipment: its technology and markets are global, and so are its organisational structures. For fiscal reasons, they decided to centralise all of their European accounting departments in Ireland. No employees would be transferred: their jobs would disappear in the other countries within 18 months.

Task
A Flexible Preparation Plan
In France, the Human Resources Department wanted to anticipate the consequences of this reorganisation for the 27 employees concerned. The need to ensure this department's continuity during the transitional period prevented them from rapidly setting up a programme of internal transfers, but medium-term repositioning could be planned. The flexible plan prepared by BPI offered a choice between professional skills assessments and individualised guidance interviews, and supplemented this individual approach with a collective preparation for job hiring interviews. This highlighted the future internal mobility as a joint choice.

Giving Meaning to these Changes
After receiving approval from the different social partners, 15 employees volunteered to take part in this project. The team of consultants handling this project adapted their assistance to the extremely diverse profiles and motivations of these employees: personnel representatives took part in this project in order to observe it from within, and some managers did so as well to set a good example. Beyond this initial approach, all those involved progressively understood the interest of this project, which attempted to give meaning to their development.
Reflection was made based on "professional introspection", but both its form and results were concrete: built around a series of four to six interviews, it analysed the employee's career and highlighted their own personal dynamic, in order to define and reinforce their professional projects. This allowed change to be seen as positive, and to develop objectives for perspectives of evolution. At the end of each analysis, the employee, the consultant, and the Human Resources Manager met to discuss the interviews and organise the actions to be taken.

Perspectives
Reviews: Tools to Assist in Preparing for Change
At the end of this experiment, after measuring the results obtained from these "professional reviews" as they applied to internal changes, the Human Resources Manager met with BPI to develop a system to help employees prepare themselves for management responsibilities. A full plan was developed for use on a national scale containing skills analyses, professional reviews and preparation sessions.