In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox talks with Michael Fossat, head of Schneider Electric’s Future Ready program. With a 180-year history, Schneider is now focused on assisting and driving the energy transition to an electric and digital future. Yet this 150,000 strong company discovered that its 51+ employees (what Avivah calls Q3) weren’t as motivated and engaged as the rest. Schneider determined to fix that, especially given the talent wars they feel pressing on their business needs every day. The Future Ready Program is their response.

Michael Fossat has worked at Schneider for much of his professional career. Passionate about sustainable business and people’s central role in achieving it, he joined Schneider Electric in France as an HR apprentice in an industrial department, participated in the creation of HR shared services for the entire group and worked in the R&D division, before moving to Barcelona to create the HR Metrics function globally. Returning to Paris he was successively HR VP for one of the business units, HR head of Central and Eastern Europe and HR leader for European plants and distribution centres. In taking on his current role in 2021 as head of the Future Ready Program he brought a wide knowledge of what motivates people across the group.

Schneider Electric website

Schneider Electric – Company Purpose

https://www.kornferry.com/content/dam/kornferry/docs/pdfs/KF-Future-of-Work-Talent-Crunch-Report.pdf

https://www.aarpinternational.org/

Articles by Avivah on other Corporate Initiatives: Unilever and Aviva

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Michael Fossat: Getting Global Companies Future-Ready