Supporting Innovation at Airbus in the Era of Remote Work

As companies adopt remote and hybrid work models, we need to develop new ways of engaging with employees and supporting their ideas, says Alice de Casanove, Culture Evolution, Intrapreneurship Director, Airbus.

In this interview, de Casanove talks about the importance of actively developing innovation and intrapreneurship, the changing role of managers, and how Airbus is looking to upskill its organization for the future.

Diana Davis, IX Network: You're involved with the development of innovation, competencies and learning, at Airbus. Can you tell us about your role?

Alice de Casanove, Airbus: At Airbus we believe that innovation must be managed. It's not a question of serendipity. We want to propose a structured approach for our innovators to support the development of their ideas. For this, it's important to develop the competencies to manage ideas. We want our people to know how to test ideas, how to scale them up, and how to make them grow. We also want to reduce some of the uncertainties that they may have around their ideas before they’re ready to launch.

For all these stages, we cannot use our regular project management tools and methods. That's the reason we have defined the competences that we need to support innovation management. We have created a “competence catalogue;” this is a list of all the required competencies. This way, our employees can map themselves against the catalogue and identify any competence gaps they may have. Then we can propose learning solutions upskill them.

That's also part also of my mission - to identify relevant learning solutions and develop them with support of our innovation teams and our different functions for learning in Airbus.

Diana Davis, IX Network:  Basically, the premise is that innovation is not just a bunch of good ideas, it needs to be nurtured?

Alice de Casanove, Airbus: Yes, new ideas must be nurtured by innovators. We want to help them to identify when they have a good idea and when it's worth sharing it with other colleagues. Also, we want to help our managers support the development of an idea.

The challenge with new ideas is that they’re not part of the “business as usual” plan. We must take some of our resources to develop an idea and reduce the uncertainties that we can have around it. The role of the manager is to make sure that we use efficient efficiently our resources to deliver what is expected in the business today. It’s risky for managers to take some of these resources to explore uncertain projects and ideas that sometimes don't work. That’s why we want to upskill and help managers on this journey.

When you say ‘no’ to an innovator, you create frustration and disengagement. On the other hand, we need to find a balance. We cannot support all new ideas. Some ideas are not worth rolling out. We want to figure that out as quickly as possible to make sure that we can focus our resources on the most promising ones.

Diana Davis, IX Network: COVID-19 has forced everyone to move – at least temporarily - into remote operations. How do you think this shift to remote operations has impacted on organizations ability to collaborate and innovate?

Alice de Casanove, Airbus: COVID has had an impact on our ways of working. We had to prove that we can work remotely and that it's efficient. Indeed, sometimes it’s even more efficient.  

One area that has changed is contact with customers. When you get in front of your customer, you can better them understand them and gain the insight you need to find new approaches.  With more remote contact and less in person, we have more frequent, but shorter, conversations with our customers than previously. So, we must learn how to get what we need in a new context.

Within Airbus, we’re switching to more of a Intrapreneur approach. These are people who are able to deliver their ideas with the resources we have available today. When I talk about innovators, these are people who have ideas and look for support, for instance, to develop their engines. As we go more digital there is room for intrapreneurs who can build demonstration models with very low resources to first get attention before committing resources to build something

Diana Davis, IX Network:  You mentioned a few things of the changes. What sort of strategies can you deploy to effectively deal with these changes?

Alice de Casanove, Airbus: I think it's important to come up with new ways to engage employees. There's a risk of employee disengagement because of the lack of proximity. So, you must create a new proximity. You can do it through surveys to check on their needs, their relationship with their management, and their mental health.

You can engage in the employees in the transformation of the of the company. When employees feel like an actor of this transformation, they feel more empowered and that’s how you create engagement.

This changes the role of the manager. In the past, we talked about managers as a coach. They need to check that an employee has the resources and the competencies to deliver the job. That’s more and more true.  But we must also add to this now, that in addition to ensuring the resources and competencies that managers also help employees with the network. When we were all in offices there was a serendipity to meet new people over lunch or during a coffee break.  Now, it’s up to the manager to ensure networking and cohesion in the team and in the company.

Diana Davis, IX Network: Can you give an example of something that you've done at Airbus?

Alice de Casanove, Airbus: For the implementation of our remote work policy, we launched something that we call the hybrid working journey. Remote work is not just about the implementation of a new policy. It also changes the way that we assess the performance of our employees and how we foster collaboration in the assessment of this performance.

When we launched our change management plan for the remote work policy, it was not only to educate about the content of the policy, it was also to invite all our managers and employees to join us in this journey. They needed to be part of the discussion because they were going to have to change the way that they collaborate and the way that they assess performance.

Diana Davis, IX Network: What’s your focus for the year ahead?

Alice de Casanove, Airbus: I’ll be focusing on developing intrapreneurship within Airbus.  We have recently launched a community of practice to develop and upskill our people by taking advantage of the knowledge of our intrapreneurs with the most experience.

Within this community of practice, we are codesigning our new hybrid learning solutions. We are looking for a hybrid learning solution that can provide e-learning digital content as part of our learning path.

We also are exploring creating a pool of coaches to support our trainees on their journey. Our coaches have extensive experience but how can they adopt the relevant behaviors to be effective as a coach in our new hybrid learning model?

We’re looking at how we provide the skills and competencies for our innovation coaches.  Those are the challenges for the year ahead as we replace in person training with this model of e-learning and a pool of coaches.

Interested in Learning More?

Join Alice de Casanove and over 500 manufacturing leaders online on March 29, 2022, to hear from global manufacturing trailblazers how to keep your frontline workers safe, mobile and efficient in the current environment. Register for this free, online event at Connecter Worker Manufacturing.