Intrapreneurial Initiative Inspires Havas

Elodie Doua, an intrapreneur from the second cohort of the Initiative talks about her experience.

Hello my name is Elodie Doua. I have been part of the 2nd group of the intrapreneurship initiative and have been working at HAVAS for 2 years now when Jan-Nicolas and Stephane asked me if I wanted to do the program I thought to myself that it would be crazy to say no because as a project manager I've been thrilled to help my client and doing it for like more than 5 years now but I have this lack of creativity that I can have with my own business "le club social” and knowing that my employer do not see me just as a project manager but also as a business owner it means a lot at first when you get invited to sponsor a candidate you're not sure what's your part in it what I've learned is that by being there you help your candidate her talent her project to grow but that's what I did with Elodie. My name is Jelena Vidovic and I am in charge of organizational culture at HAVAS Montreal. Our main focus is on our employees. We want to give them concrete ways to be able to develop themselves. one of the ways we found was to get involved with the intrapreneurial project in Montreal. The whole experience was a key point in my business because it helped me focus on my business values also my Business Services and all those knowledge that I had with the program helped me not only as an event planner but also as a project manager here at HAVAS because now I can really relate to my client as the way they relate to their products and their services and now I can transpose that emotion into their program or into their website or their campaign so it was not only a good point to Elodie the event planner but also Elodie the project manager. we got started with the initiative a couple years ago when we were asked what defines employer branding for a company like us in advertising and my answer was quite simple our brand our employer brand is defined by each of our employees personal brand and in order to achieve that we do a number of things to encourage our employees to create content participate in conferences and the initiative was adding a layer on top of that where it would start to help us get employees personal projects whether they're cultural or commercial on the ground and get them going with that and the idea behind that is if you have a side project That's outside your 9 to 5 job it will nourish 9 to 5 job in any case and that will make that will make you better at your job more creative and obviously this is win/win for us and for the for the employees who participate in the initiative for your employees projects and you probably don't know half of them are a treasure and if you can first find them and find the right people and let them participate in initiatives like the business family's foundation initiative it's a clear recipe for success