Coface: Ensures a safe office return and provides a great co-working experience

With 75 years of experience, Coface is a leader in the credit insurance and risk management market. Coface is a team of 4,500 people of 78 nationalities across nearly 60 countries, all sharing a corporate culture across the world.

Together, they work towards one objective: facilitating trade by helping their 50,000 corporate clients develop their businesses. As a close-knit, international organisation at the core of the global economy, Coface offers an enriching work experience on several levels: relational, professional, and cultural.

What was the challenge?

he Covid situation has changed our way of working. Having been forced into 100% remote work during the peak of the virus situation we have decided to come back with a hybrid office arrangement, partially remote, partially from the office.

Due to this reduced utilization of our office spaces in all our Central and Eastern European countries we have decided to go into a shared desk policy with either costs savings due to reduced office spaces or offices redesigned with more meeting spaces, co-working areas, social areas etc.

It was important to us to make our employees comfortable when returning to the new working environment. Employee’s wellbeing was always crucial in our return-to-the-office strategy, with their safety being the highest priority.

How did you make your people feel more comfortable about returning to the office?

Our people are our no.1 priority. While it was important to us that we started to return to the office to foster exchange and cooperation in and between the teams, we took care that none of our employees felt uncomfortable. HybridHero is great for us as they had a number of features designed to look after our people’s well-being, including Covid self-certification, social distancing protocols, and Track & Trace capability. The HybridHero platform was a great enabler of our hybrid strategy and gave people increased comfort in a safe return to the office.

How does all this help you manage your office costs?

Now that we are starting our new working model, it is already clear that we will need less office space in the future. The tool helps us in fine-tuning our space requirements. For the teams, HybridHero is an intuitive app to manage their working week and select their favourite desk.

For the management team, the data we receive from the HybridHero reporting module is giving us a good overview of the utilization of our office space in order to optimize our real estate costs. Being able to monitor the usage of desks and meeting rooms gives us the necessary basis for proper management decisions about our future needs.