L’Oréal gives hybrid work a makeover with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams

Reimagining global meetings and reducing travel with Teams

As Cyril Chapuy, President of the L’Oréal Luxe division, sees it, the right tools can help a large global company function like a startup. “Even though we’re big, we still want to behave like a smaller, more entrepreneurial company,” Chapuy says. “We want to empower our employees with state-of-the-art tools that allow them to communicate smoothly and feel like they’re part of a community.”

Key to that vision is Microsoft Teams, which L’Oréal rolled out in 2019 and expanded during COVID-19 to accommodate an increasingly remote workforce. Teams has since become a major part of how L’Oréal employees work, no matter where they are. “Hybrid work is the new norm, and that’s why we chose to work with Microsoft,” says Bertin. “Microsoft Teams is the best way to support this new way of working.”

Factory visits are one business process that L’Oréal transformed with Teams. “They’re a vital part of how we manage our operations,” says Martin Motte, Global Quality, Environment, and Health and Safety Director at L’Oréal. In the past, those visits happened in person via factory tours where Motte and his team would interact with employees, identify pain points, and resolve problems together. When COVID-19 travel restrictions made these visits impossible, Motte and his colleagues continued conducting factory visits, but this time in Teams. “We use Teams as a new way to interact with the shop floor,” he says, citing one visit to a Chinese factory that included drone footage of a newly built facility. “Thanks to the creativity of our Chinese team, we organized a virtual tour of the plant,” he explains. “We met the management team, heard about their strategy, and toured the facility—even interacting directly with factory workers—all via Microsoft Teams.” Motte used the opportunity to discover more about new equipment at the facility and helped troubleshoot challenges that the employees shared. “Using Teams allowed us to have a full experience while being remote in Paris. I was very impressed by the quality of the interactions we were able to capture.”

Packaging engineers also devised an innovative use of Teams to move their work forward despite travel restrictions. “We used Microsoft HoloLens technology combined with Teams to remotely inspect packaging components and troubleshoot any issues on the spot,” says Motte. And while reducing travel was a necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic, finding new ways to be productive also helps L’Oréal reduce its carbon footprint. “It’s clear that avoiding travel to the other side of the planet for a two-hour meeting is an amazing use of technology that will help us meet our sustainability goals,” adds Motte.

And the recent addition of Microsoft Teams Rooms systems to L’Oréal offices is helping participants get the most out of hybrid meetings, whether they join from home, the office, or anywhere else. “Teams Rooms is helping create inclusive environments for everyone in the meeting rooms and at home,” says Bertin. “It’s very exciting for us because participants can co-create, share content, and make updates in real time as if they’re all together in the same room.” L’Oréal employees use Teams Rooms to have more efficient meetings, too, according to Harriet Chisholm, Digital Upskilling Manager at L’Oréal. “The fact that it’s so easy to connect makes it very intuitive and efficient to begin meetings,” she says.

Unlocking new opportunities with digital learning

L’Oréal is now using Teams to reimagine how training gets delivered to employees. “After COVID-19, we observed a massive shift in how we deliver learning and upskilling. Before the pandemic, learning was predominantly in person,” says Chisholm, noting that travel to Paris or other corporate hubs was often required. “We’ve unlocked the ability to travel from our desks by adopting a more self-directed learning culture with more online courses.” Bertin agrees that using Teams helped open new possibilities for learning. “Now that we’ve digitized our trainings and education with Teams, employees can access content anytime, anywhere, from any device,” he says.

“Teams helped democratize our learning,” adds Chisholm, citing a recent Digital Discovery Virtual Training program where new hires gathered in Teams to learn more about the digital organization at L’Oréal. “We’ve reached more people for our Digital Discovery Virtual event, 600 as opposed to 100, because we use Teams to deliver it rather than hosting it in person.” When planning the program, Chisholm and her colleagues used Microsoft Planner to organize the event. “We use a plethora of tools to plan an event within Teams,” she says. “From planning to execution, everything we need is in one place.” A cohesive digital ecosystem is beneficial for streamlining the planning process and helping ensure that an event goes smoothly. “In addition to planning trainings in Teams, we also used Teams breakout rooms, whiteboarding, Microsoft Forms, and even non-Microsoft apps like CoffeePals to make the learning experience as dynamic as possible,” says Chisholm. And learning doesn’t have to stop when a session ends. “We often download the Q&A from a Teams event and send it to people who might have missed it,” Chisholm continues. “That further helps create an inclusive environment.”

L’Oréal employees are also using Teams Live Events to communicate with thousands of colleagues at a time, with the added benefit of being able to record and share the sessions with others who might have missed the live event. “It’s important to be extremely transparent and interactive with global teams,” says Bertin, who regularly uses Teams Live Events to lead communications with 2,000 participants from within L’Oréal’s technology organization. “Teams Live Events are an extremely powerful way to bring communities together in a digital space.”

Employees at L’Oréal are also spontaneously gathering in Teams to create communities of interest and share best practices. “We’ve seen many communities spring up—for instance, a service community and a CRM community,” says Chisholm. “Those communities happen organically when people have the platform to create them.”

Highlighting culture in a world of hybrid work

Part of L’Oréal’s ongoing digital journey involves providing employees with the platforms and tools to communicate and share their invaluable knowledge, from anywhere. “Four years ago, we started our beauty technology transformation,” says Bertin. “Technology is at the heart of what we do, and simplifying our ways of working is part of how we plan to continue delivering innovative new beauty services and products. Doing that in a world of hybrid work requires collaboration technologies that can keep pace with our digital vision.” 

Ultimately, L’Oréal is also boosting its culture with digital tools. “Our culture at L’Oréal is very much about being together,” says Chisholm. “We use Teams to support hybrid work and find ways to bring that culture into digital and in-person interactions.”

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