2 questions for… Catherine Papillon, Sustainability and CSR Director at BNP Paribas Real Estate

A key player in real estate, BNP Paribas Real Estate is consolidating its commitments to sustainable development with its new mobility policy and the installation of a mobility hub in the Métal 57 office building in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. A look back at this work with Catherine Papillon, Sustainability and CSR Director at BNP Paribas Real Estate.
 

How did you build your sustainable mobility policy?

Catherine Papillon: Mobility is an important subject in the fight against climate change and contributes to the attractiveness and feeling of well-being in cities. It is therefore a real challenge for our activities and for our employees. Thus, our new sustainable mobility policy is in line with the CSR commitments of BNP Paribas Real Estate. Its ambition is to reduce the environmental footprint linked to the travel of our teams, while meeting their new expectations in terms of mobility. From now on, the policy covers not only business trips and company vehicles, but also commuting.

To define this new mobility policy, we worked with Arval, also a subsidiary of the BNP Paribas Group, specialising in the management of company fleets and mobility solutions. We followed several steps:

• The definition of strategic objectives and the prioritis ation of the levers that allow the various businesses and functions of the company to be embarked.
• The diagnosis of the three perimeters studied (company vehicles, business trips and home-work journeys) via the analysis of current practices and expenses or even the mapping of the place of residence of our employees.
• The survey carried out among our 2,000 employees in France on their mobility habits and the levers that would allow them to move towards more gentle practices.
• The co-construction of implementation paths fed by the data collected during working groups bringing together employees from our various businesses and functions.

All this work has led to the emergence of proposals, presented to General Management for validation of the axes of the overall policy. For example, we integrate company vehicles with bicycles (conventional or electric, including cargo bikes), scooters and a wider range of hybrid or electric vehicles. For business trips, the aim is to encourage employees to use the train rather than the plane when this is relevant in terms of travel time. For commuter journeys, we encourage carpooling and soft mobility (cycling, scooter, walking, etc.). To encourage these more virtuous practices, we are also working on setting up a mobility package.

Your sustainable mobility policy was implemented for the first time in your Métal 57 operation. How is this project a concrete application of your policy?

Catherine Papillon: The Métal 57 operation is the big news for BNP Paribas Real Estate, since the building has been home to 1,200 employees since the end of March 2022. It was the perfect opportunity to implement our sustainable mobility policy for the first time.

In concrete terms, the site has a mobility hub, equipped with multiple shared vehicle solutions: 8 electric scooters, 4 cars and 18 electric bikes. We are also studying the possibility of adding scooters. In addition, the building has more than one hundred parking spaces for bicycles, but also spaces for scooters, as well as electrified spaces. Bicycle repair services will also be offered.

Access to our mobility solutions is facilitated by the Arval Mobility application. The latter allows employees to find the best route, book the most relevant means of transport and unlock it (shared car, bike, or scooter of the hub), or to choose public transport, carpooling or call a taxi or a VTC.

We will measure user satisfaction via a survey at the end of the year. This will allow us to adjust our mobility offer.

The next step is to raise awareness and inform our teams about this new mobility policy and the systems offered at Métal57.

It will then be a question of applying this policy to our other sites in France, adapting it to local needs and existing infrastructures. We will then move on to our European sites.

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