Paris, Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Orange launches its “digital and caring employer promise” and sets-out a new foundation for the relationship between Orange and its employees. It is a fundamental component of the Essentiels2020 strategic plan.

Through this promise, Orange is reaffirming that social quality is a key driver for economic performance and, for the first time, goes further by offering an initiative common to the entire Group. It takes into account the rapid development of digital uses and sets-out a series of commitments towards its employees that are symmetrical with the contributions expected of each person in their work as part of a collective workforce. It upholds a clear goal: to offer employees a unique experience, equal to the one we wish to give our customers.The Orange promise approach

The ambition of Essentiels2020 is to build an unmatched customer experience. This requires the ability to listen to our customers and to act accordingly. The men and women of Orange are the main actors of this ambition. That is why Orange commits to each of its employees with a single, simple and strong promise for all, regardless of entity: a promise to be a digital and caring employer. This promise was built together with more than 1000 employees across the Group.

It is a promise which aims to build a digital, caring and unique employee experience:

• Digital: in a quickly evolving digital world, digital uses offer an incredible opportunity to simplify the employee relationship, just as Orange wishes to simplify the customer relationship, by transforming ways of working towards more autonomy and collaboration.
• Caring: Caring for people is the foundation of Orange’s plan. For Orange, being a caring employer means being close to employees, taking care of each one to ensure their quality of life at work and allowing them to take the driving seat in their own development.
• Unique: Orange takes into consideration the situation and background of each employee and turns diversity into a driver for progress and collective intelligence.

Three priorities have been defined to fulfil our promise as a digital and caring employer: ensure the right skills for tomorrow, develop agile ways of working and encourage employee engagement.

Ensure the right skills for tomorrow

The technology revolution is accelerating and demands that we adapt continuously to new challenges and new disciplines: the development of very high speed broadband with Fibre and the evolution of 4G/5G mobile networks, the development of digital services, which bring new customer requirements to the fore and new jobs in areas such as big data, digital marketing, cloud computing, cyberdefense, network virtualisation and new business opportunities such as banking.

Against this backdrop, ensuring our employees' present and future skills is still the best way to stand out among competitors. Our goals:

• to conduct a responsible employment policy, with skills development for our employees and a forward-looking and fair recruitment policy that values diversity;
• to recognise each person and set up personalised development pathways by giving each employee the means of acting on his or her own development;
• to be a benchmark digital employer by capturing every opportunity to simplify the employee experience and streamline the organisation of work.

Develop agile ways of working

Collective agility is fundamental if we are to be more responsive to our customers’ expectations and market developments. For Orange, agile ways of working means:

• encouraging all employees to take the initiative by granting autonomy, by recognising that everyone can make mistakes, by simplifying the organisation of work;
• encouraging collective ways of working through a project-based approach or through knowledge communities. Our Plazza internal social network contributes to this;
• enable the evolution of the work environment by providing work spaces designed to facilitate employee cooperation and wellbeing at work. Orange Gardens, inaugurated on 8 June, is a good example of this.

Encourage employee engagement

As for its commitment to its customers, Orange also makes a commitment to its employees. The Group will create the conditions necessary to enable each employee to become an engaged and enthusiastic actor within the company. To that end, Orange will:

• value each employee’s voice; it will listen and act by giving each employee the means to implement his or her ideas through teamwork;
• recognise each individual’s contribution, balancing the individual with the collective, while focusing on customer satisfaction;
• embrace ethical behaviour, responsibility and diversity as sources of social performance and societal contributions. This especially concerns digital support, employment of the young, equal opportunities and the environment. The Orange Foundations offer a fitting framework to make the link between our internal and external actions.

The digital and caring employer promise will be translated into tangible actions that will embody it in each of the Group’s countries. In France, for example, the 2020 social contract will build on the foundation of the 2010 contract, with special focus on digital ways of working and the role of each person in the company. Orange also reaffirms the importance of dialogue with employee representatives in order to create favourable conditions for implementation.

Jérôme Barré, Orange Senior Executive Vice President of Human Resources said:

“Men and women are the face and the voice of Orange in support of our goal of building an unmatched customer experience. For them, we want to build a unique employee experience.”