How to disrupt and transform annual reviews with Zest?

The context

Celio is a men’s and women’s ready-to-wear brand operating in around forty countries, with 280 sites in France and 2,000 employees. When Marie-Karine Tibi took over as HR Director three and a half years ago, the company was emerging from court-supervised receivership and a job protection plan. HR had narrowed its focus to core statutory functions: administration, payroll and employee relations. HR development had taken a back seat.

The priority was clear. Celio needed to rebuild an ambitious, pragmatic HR policy grounded in objective data rather than perceptions. The central challenge? Getting a reliable read on the ground across a multi-site organization, where the loudest voices, such as regional directors or union representatives, risk drowning out weak collective signals.

Three practical use cases

The combination of the Listen and Succeed modules addressed these challenges. Several initiatives were put in place:

A three-step individual review, structured in Zest, that always opens with a mood question rated from 1 to 5. Any score of 1 or 2 triggers an alert to the manager and HR for individual, confidential follow-up.

An annual social climate barometer, fully anonymous, rolled out to all employees across stores, head office and the logistics platform. It measures key trends: engagement, working conditions, and perceptions of career, training and pay.

Targeted on-demand surveys, launched freely for specific groups such as a department, a region or head office employees only. Questions are fully customized to current needs.

A telling indicator: participation

Among the indicators tracked, the participation rate is seen as a direct signal of trust in the approach. At Celio, the barometer achieves 77% overall participation and 100% at the logistics platform, a population often considered hard to reach. This figure shows that trust in the process has been built over time. Systematic communication about the actions taken in response to feedback played a key role.

The benefits

✅ An objective, reliable read on the ground. HR can distinguish individual issues from collective trends and avoid drawing broad conclusions from isolated cases.

✅ Better-informed budget decisions. The HR department knows exactly where to invest first.

✅ Concrete, visible actions. These include revised communication on staff uniforms, a new internal mobility site, the rollout of an e-learning platform, and in-person manager training led by internal experts.

✅ Stronger HR legitimacy within the Executive Committee. Structured data is presented regularly to senior leadership, including an AI-generated summary shared at Executive Committee meetings to flag priority issues.

Zest’s support

The Celio team highlights the value of learning by doing, particularly when it comes to sharing results. Access rights were calibrated gradually to avoid any counterproductive effects. Results are now shared from a threshold of 25 people at head office and at regional level for stores, which protects anonymity and preserves employee trust.