Sodexo's Michel Landel - Building Gender Balanced Business

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. Women represent 57% of Sodexo’s employees and 50% of its customers
2. The biggest barrier to change is cultural. Mindsets need to change before the company can fully tap into the female talent base and appeal to the female consumers
3. The first step to changing the gender balance is training and education inside the company
4. Following this, you need to invest in mentoring programmes and introduce more workplace flexibility
5. Sodexo’s diversity initiative will enable the company to become more customer-focused

Sodexo is a food company that serves 50 million people every day. Women, says CEO Michel Landel, represent 57% of the company’s employees and 50% of its customers.

What’s the biggest roadblock in optimising the opportunity behind these figures? “It’s cultural,” says Landel. “It’s in the mindset of people. People don’t know much about the subject. You have to educate them about differences between genders. It’s a man’s world…” (a view he shares with NESTLE’s Paul Bulcke, see interview)

Initiatives that aim to rebalance the gender mix “need to start with education and training. Too often, companies want to skip this phase,” affirms Landel who admits to being shocked that there are so many entrenched stereotypes in his business. “We have to convince them of the opportunities,” he adds.

“Women have to make choices that men don’t in male-dominated companies. We have to organise work more flexibly and invest in mentoring. When you are a man, you always have a man who will informally mentor you. When you’re a woman, you don’t. Mentoring is essential in a career.”

“We have to move from being client-driven to being customer-driven. That has changed the dimension of our business. Our diversity initiative will support this culture change.”

The above quotes are taken from a panel discussion entitled Corporate Performance: looking for the ‘women advantage’ at the recent Women’s Forum conference in Deauville, France in October.