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Company bikes warmly welcomed by Barry Callebaut employees

In 2018, Barry Callebaut decided to introduce a cycling plan, supported by his conviction that an employee delivers a better job when working in a sound environment. Since the plan’s implementation, some 20% of its employees lease a company bike.

Vitality and sustainability are two notions that are heavily supported at Barry Callebaut enterprise. When the HR-department came up with a plan to introduce company bikes, the team was all the more determined to reach as many employees as possible. ‘When meeting the people of o2o, we felt that the shared the same ambition’, says Lies Van Echelpoel, Payroll-Manager at Barry Callebaut. Barry Callebaut and o2o went all the way in their attempt to bring a good story. The results are beyond expectations.

Overall employment at Barry Callebaut’s consists of some 50% white collar and an equal part of blue collar workers. The greater part of them lives in the immediate surroundings of their site, which explains the plan’s success, still  according to Lies Van Echelpoel. ‘We were counting on the fact that the the company bike would be highly in favour with people living at a distance lower than 20 kilometers from their site.’ Today, 20% of our collaborators are leasing a bike from the company, and that figure keeps on groing day by day.

There have been thorough consultations with the unions and Barry Callebaut’s HR-department has worked together with the people from o2o (as leasingpartner) and Securex (as social secretariat) to work out a lease cycling plan for the employee as well as for the employer. The result after lots and lots of figure and brain work  is a cycling policy that turns out to be budget neutral for Harry Callebaut and that nevertheless allows employees to freely choose their company bike for 100%. A win-win situation for all parties. Ain’t that nice indeed!  (Read more about our budget neutral formula)

On 23 June (year) Barry Callebaut presented his bicycle lease plan to his employees? haar fietsleaseplan bij de werknemers. Previously, the company’s mobility team had worked out a cycling policy with the help of the o2o team. This cycling policy explains in great detail the advantages and conditions linked with a company bike.

Van Echelpoel looks back on this launch trajectory with great satisfaction. ‘A lot of our employees work in shifts, which makes it particularly difficult to contact them all at the same moment. With the support of o2o, we nevertheless succeeded in explaining the cycling policy to all groups of employees by organising seven separate infosessions.

In order to stimulate enployees to use their bikes for communting, and obviously also to be able to offer them a safe parking place where they can leave their brand-new bike, Barry Callebaut built a new bike stall, which was officially inaugurated during a personnel event. During this event, all collaborators were presented a variety of top-notch bicycles. The people from o2o were so kind as to bring no less than 15 different types of bikes, amongst which ebikes and speedpedelecs as well. Employees were allowed to make some test drives with one or more of the bikes on show, which resulted in total in 40 testkilometers covered! The test event turned out to be a success and clearly showed that vitality and CO2-neutrality gave Barry Callebaut a powerful boost.

 

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