Developping skills and uncovering talent

DEVELOPING SKILLS AND UNCOVERING TALENT

Public authorities, businesses and employees all have a responsibility when it comes to career-long continuing education to ensure that they can adapt to changing conditions. First, training employees on new practices helps them stay employable, especially given the growing importance of the digital transformation. More broadly, this also helps give employees a sense of purpose in their work.

Our skill-building policy, which aims to help employees continuously improve the know-how required for their jobs and enhance their personal skills, has been a part of Decathlon since it was founded. Today, 81% of our teammates feel they are supported in their personal development and 85% feel they are supported in growing their know-how.

Through a system based on self-assessment, feedback, making new contacts and networking, the goal is now to teach employees about new roles and give them access to new skills on an ongoing basis.

Decathlon supports employees at every stage of their career and makes certain that teammates can find the resources they need to grow their potential when they are ready. By emphasising both subsidiarity and roles at the company, we have expanded general knowledge-sharing opportunities. Everyone is now responsible for their own learning, meaning they can take on more responsibility and become more self-reliant.

TRAINING AT DECATHLON IN FIGURES

in 2017

1,15M

hours of in-person training

and 240,588 hours of e-learning courses completed by teammates worldwide

89%

of teammates stated that responsibility helps them grow

+1% compared with 2016

Decathlon Exchange training centres

2017 SUMMARY

Multiple training platforms have been combined to form Decathlon Academy, facilitating access to information and putting teammates in charge of their own learning.

There are now five Decathlon Exchange training centres focusing on corporate values and personal development across the world.

Decathlon encourages teammates to put their business skills to work for company projects.

PIVOTING FROM CAREER PATHS TO KNOWLEDGE BASES

To help all our teammates assess their own performance, acquire the skills they need to advance and take control of their own careers, Decathlon has several tools that can be tailored to fit individual learning needs.

At the heart of the human resources transformation, self-assessments enable employees to determine the scope of their roles and responsibilities so that they can evaluate where they are successful and what they need to improve through questionnaires and interviews. Empowering employees to take charge of their own development encourages independence and leads to a sense of fulfilment with each assignment.

Previously, several e-learning and face-to-face training modules were available via a single-platform system to help employees improve their expertise over the course of their careers: Decathlon Academy. The new ecosystem provides a single point of entry to allow teammates to take control of their careers with visibility of all the skills available for each job, to promote increasing collaboration between sectors and a shared vocabulary.

What makes the system work is teammate autonomy: every employee can perform a self-assessment based on the responsibilities associated with their activity and manage their own progress, whether or not it is in their initial field of expertise.

Learner satisfaction is integral to this skill-based system: each course is evaluated so that it provides the greatest amount of satisfaction and exemplifies the principle of educational innovation.

Our goal is to increase the number of teammate training courses and to make the in-house learning process seamless.

In 2017 employees completed 1,154,105 hours of in-person training and 240,588 hours of e-learning courses worldwide. In France 3.98% of the yearly payroll was invested in training our teams.

DECATHLON EXCHANGES FOSTERS PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

In addition to a careers strategy, Decathlon encourages teammates to think about how their professional development allows them to unlock new skills and create novel products. The Decathlon Exchanges, which exist in five countries worldwide, have supported teammates on the topic of empowerment-based management since 2005.

This work has helped strengthen the company’s cultural identity throughout the transformations that have taken place and ensured that each teammate could live out their own values through their work.

This approach is part of the human resources transformation at Decathlon, dovetailing purpose and values and helping each teammate fulfil their potential within the context of our accelerated international expansion and our efforts to ensure that decisions are as closely aligned as possible with needs.

PROMOTING ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND CREATING ALTERNATIVE SUCCESS STORIES

Decathlon promotes skill building at every level. This motivates teammates who have big ideas to develop them and make them available within the company in hopes of eventually taking them mainstream. That is how Allan Ballester developed “Decathlives”, a corporate couchsurfing programme that connects teammates who are willing to host their colleagues and those who want a new experience when travelling for business.