Building an open and transparent culture with Chantelle Lingerie

Major challenges

In a rapidly changing retail market, the Chantelle Lingerie Group is now facing a major challenge: to transform the company and merge the group’s various brands under the Chantelle umbrella brand, which brings together the group’s various distribution channels and the different levels of ranges and brands (Chantelle, Passionata, Femilet, etc.) to better meet the new customers’ needs.

In this context, recruiting and maintaining engaged employees is strategic and complex, especially in the textile market where it can take several years to train an executive.

Measuring employee satisfaction with Zest

This is why Chantelle has been using Zest since 2018 to measure employee satisfaction and support change.

Zest allows Chantelle to measure the level of commitment of its employees, their satisfaction, their commitment to the company’s project, and to have a global approach to the employer brand internally and externally to attract the right talent.

The project was first launched with the head office population, then extended to the network: workshop, logistics and wholesale. Chantelle uses Zest’s Listen pillar and all its functionalities, namely: surveys, moods, engageometer (which has the advantage of offering managers a turnkey tool) and motivation levers.

Culture of openness

The specificity of the project lies in the openness with which it is conducted, an openness that is a fundamental value of the company, truly constitutive of its DNA. Openness is essential to support the company’s transformation project, which needs the resources, energy and innovative capacity of its employees to make this strategic shift.

For example, this openness is reflected in the absence of confidential information and the sharing of all key figures.

Non-standard management of anonymity

As a result, Chantelle chose to launch its first surveys by imposing public, i.e. non-anonymous, responses.

This choice went against the trend of traditional social barometer practices, which almost systematically offer anonymity (in 95% of the surveys launched in Zest), in order to provide a reassuring framework and a certain freedom of expression for employees.

Chantelle’s decision not to offer this possibility of anonymity reinforces the need for transparency at all levels of the company. The high participation rates of the surveys, between 66% and 75% depending on the type of population targeted, whether at headquarters or in the field, support this strong position.

Feedback and HR action plan

Openness is also reflected in the way the results of HR surveys and social barometers are reported. The policy has been to disclose all the results of the surveys, without any censorship, while anticipating internal resistance. The focus was on finding solutions and not on finding the guilty parties. In order to ensure that the various opinions expressed did not remain a dead letter, action plans were systematically put in place at the level of each department at the initiative of the HR department to really get things moving. This fine-tuning of HR action plans at the level of each stratum of the company has given credibility to the company’s desire to transform itself and to instil this culture of openness.

For example, the first HR survey in 2018 highlighted the fact that “relations with the manager” was the lowest rated item. Thanks to the publication of these results and the implementation of specific action plans, particularly in terms of training, management is now one of the highest rated items in HR surveys.

To learn more about Chantelle’s experience, watch the replay of our webinar (in French) ” Implement a culture of transparency “