CSR and inclusion in action! - Interview with Bruno Renard (CEA Grenoble)

Bruno Renard is definitely a man of action. As CSR Coordinator at the CEA (Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission) in Grenoble, he energetically leads all CSR projects there. Over the years, he has built a team that he does not hesitate to challenge. A state of mind that he applies to himself, because doing things by halves does not interest him. Bruno loves excellence and efficiency and does not hide it. On the way to the National Assembly, where he will present a documentary on an inclusion project related to autism, he gave us an interview. A colorful and frank meeting.

How has Corporate Social Responsibility (social and environmental) evolved in recent years?

For large groups, you have to do a CSR report. It is a legal obligation. For small businesses, CSR could previously be considered a bonus. In the last meetings I had with the Medef, CSR is no longer an added value. It has become vital. In addition, with the Covid crisis, we are almost at full employment and we cannot find employees. The employer brand and the attractiveness of the company are important data to be able to recruit employees in our companies.

In a position like yours, what is expected of you? What are your goals?

We are a high-tech research center and we do industrial transfer on societal developments. We help quadriplegics "to walk". We transform waste into energy. We do sustainable mobility, hydrogen. My boss told me: "Since we are going to seek funding with industrial companies, local authorities, Europe, we have to be consistent with what comes out of our laboratories in technology and I want societal innovation." And he put me in charge of that.

How does this translate on the ground?

I'll start with an example: mobility. We have three shuttles and lots of electric vehicles in the CEA fleet. We have the best mobility plan in France, in terms of modal shift, with only 3 out of 10 employees coming by car individually. All the others are by bike, etc.

In addition, I have included social clauses in the contracts. Thus, the green spaces are managed by employees with disabilities. They carry out reasoned mowing and we treat the fauna and biodiversity.

The "bottom up" is also very important. That is to say that in general, all companies do top down, by imposing to do this or that action, but it does not work. In 2018, I made a call for ideas to create desire and see if employees wanted to get involved in this social responsibility. It was an extraordinary success: we had 400 contributions and we had to create workshops.

As a state operator, I do not sell goods or services. So I do not engage in greenwashing. We have resources that we self-finance, particularly through sponsorship and external self-financing. And at the CEA, we have a population made up of researchers, research engineers, who are totally in the spirit of innovation and experimentation.

My biggest job today is to break down prejudices, change behaviors through awareness-raising, coaching, tutoring, mentoring, events, etc. And I have a CSR team split in two, one on the environmental side and the other on the social side.

Sometimes companies tend to be tight-lipped about CSR. How do we make sure that actions are effective?

First of all, we are a company, so we evaluate what we do. We systematically check whether it works or not, thanks to reports and tools that allow us to verify all of this. At the CEA in Grenoble, we have a lot of success so we are very happy, but if that were not the case, we would be useless.

Today, we can see that we have gained in productivity with our employees, because they are proud to be in our company. An employee who is proud of his membership works better. It's clear! We save money. We also gain in attractiveness. We seek industrial partnerships. And manufacturers like to work with exemplary and inclusive companies. When we ask for European budgets, we are asked to detail what our CSR policy is. We demonstrate its solidity and we collect the funding.

What inclusion issues can we address through CSR?

First, we break down prejudices. We change the codes of the company. Today, there are failures. For example, when we hire an employee with a disability, they are integrated. But the management is not adapted... It will be a failure and the employee leaves. So the first challenge is to make the body of the company fertile, like during a transplant, so when we bring in diversity, it works. Behavioral changes are part of it. Then we work on sourcing, namely how to identify people of diversity so that they come to work in the company? Then we work on awareness-raising actions for employees on all CSR subjects: psychosocial risks, respect for women, diversity, etc.

We made a 52-minute documentary called Hymn to Inclusion, with 4 career paths of autistic employees in 4 different companies, to show companies that they can recruit and that it works. It is a tool that helps raise awareness among companies about integrating autistic employees and which is in line with our experiment of 3 fixed-term contracts for autistic people that we integrated into the CEA. We are currently writing a white paper on this.

We are going to launch a major Mission Locale project at the same time. Local missions in France are public employment services that look after young people aged 16 to 25. These young people are generally outside the school system and outside training channels. We are therefore going to provide an educational tool to be able to identify among these young people, people with undiagnosed autism and which would allow us to better help them in their professional development.

How can we welcome and work with a diverse audience, particularly those linked to neurodiversity and autism?

At the CEA, we had a fairly advanced policy regarding people with disabilities. Our sites were 100% accessible. We had done everything to be able to accommodate them. And like most companies for years, we worked on so-called classic disabilities, i.e. visible ones… In 2018, we had an employee whose daughter is autistic and who joined us on a fixed-term contract. It went very badly. We realized that there was a general rejection because there had been a similar case with another intern. So I banged my fist on the table and asked the teams to look at why it was so difficult to integrate autistic people into our company. In the end, everything was based on prejudices, relating to neurodevelopmental disorders. People are afraid that autistic people will break the social climate, that they will be counterproductive…

You know, we are a research center. I will tell you very clearly: if you have a research project and you take 10 people from a top business school and put them in the lab. They are all super qualified, super good. On the other hand, you build an ultra-diverse team in size, weight, ethnic origin, with cognitive diversity… And you will see the capacity for innovation of diversity. And it is true, it is concrete. The former all have the same codes. While the latter will bring richness. Here, we file 600 patents per year. We need diversity to create and innovate.

What helps an autistic person integrate well into a team?

First of all, you have to make a diagnosis. This can be done very simply through a questionnaire or with people who come to help you and see how your company is positioned on this subject. You have to check whether the employees are ready. If you try to integrate people with disabilities, it will be catastrophic if you have not anticipated, with awareness-raising.

I'll give you an example of when we hired an autistic employee on a fixed-term contract for a webmaster position. The department concerned shared a space with another team. And so they had coffee together. The first volunteer team was totally welcoming to the autistic employee. We hadn't considered that there would be rejection. When we announced the employee's arrival, there were people from the other team who blocked everything, saying that they weren't ready to drink coffee next to an autistic person. We brought in a psychologist to allay fears and the job coach* was also important with the teams.

Integrating the family, which is extremely important for the autistic person, is a factor that can also facilitate the success of an integration. For example, doing the job interview with the parents is interesting, because the applicants are confident. We also adapt the moments with the autistic people and the job coach makes the connection between the company and the family.

At the CEA, we have a salary scale for all our employees. We have high-level autistic people in engineering positions who do not have a degree. So we work with universities to get autistic employees to get a degree, so that in our company they are paid a fair price.

*Job Coach: This is someone who will help support the autistic person in their private life, and especially their professional life to facilitate their integration into the company. The system is paid for by the companies. The job coach will have a privileged relationship with the autistic person. He is trained, knows how to talk to them and reassure them.