Leroy Merlin gets smart about collaboration as its legal team goes deep with Asana

Leroy Merlin is a home improvement powerhouse with a place in 35% of French households and a presence worldwide. For one hundred years it has led innovation with 30,000 employees, residents, and partner associations, coming together to build products and services that enable people to live better and in a more sustainable way. 

Amel Rechid is a Legal Manager at Leroy Merlin France. She has responsibility for contracts concerning purchases and the supply chain, which feeds its 144 stores and delivers to 600m online customers. “Our growth meant that internally our projects have become more complex. So we started to think about sourcing a project management tool that could add structure to our work,” she explained. “We knew other departments in Leroy Merlin used Asana and decided to try it for ourselves. Taking a test and learn approach, we thought, ‘let’s just put all our projects in and see how it works’. It has been amazing to experience how simple Asana is to use and the visibility it provides of our day-to-day work.”

Securing oversight and cross-functional collaboration 

Before implementing Asana, the legal department was reliant on basic tools, like emails and spreadsheets, which negatively impacted the team’s performance. “Each lawyer would update 3-4 spreadsheets for their projects, as well as spreadsheets from our internal customers in marketing, supply chain, IT, and services. It made project management such a time-consuming process,” said Amel. “ Then came the meeting minutes, contracts, and supporting documentation - it could take up to 3 hours to find the information we needed.

“Also, with reporting being a manual process, it was really difficult to gain a whole view of our work. We had no automation and no visualisation of data, which made it hard to track and measure our activities. And we had no way to capitalise on the knowledge of employees once they left the company.”

Smart collaboration through Asana

As a central function, the legal team collaborates with other business departments within Leroy Merlin. According to the Anatomy of Work Index, when a business enacts ‘smart collaboration’ it is the prime differentiator between success and failure. Teams are equipped to do their jobs more effectively, which enables a company to reach its goals faster by growing revenue, weathering storms, and meeting customer needs.  

“We knew if we found a way to share information about our projects effectively, we could capitalise to become more productive,” said Amel. “Asana helped us to formalise our working processes and help our internal customers to realise the value of working with the legal team.”

Laser focus creates more time for strategic work

Leroy Merlin was smart about its implementation. It chose to optimise its working processes by taking advantage of Asana’s integrations to connect to existing tools, including Google Suite for productivity and document management, and Miro for brainstorming and project management. It has eliminated the need for unnecessary manual effort - the Anatomy of Work Index shows employees waste 58% of their workday on ‘work about work’ and spend just 9% of their workday on strategic tasks.

“We don’t waste time filling in the blanks on spreadsheets anymore,” said Amel. “We don’t even need to think about reporting. Asana is magic. Now we can just focus on our projects because we know we can run any report whenever we need to, and demonstrate the tangible value the legal team adds to the process.”

Efficiency simplifies and speeds up the process

The Anatomy of Work Index suggests that employees in senior roles can save 5.6 hours per week simply by improving existing work processes. The legal department at Leroy Merlin always has several strategic projects in progress at any one time. Amel believes her team achieves the efficiency it needs to deliver projects because of the rules set within Asana, which govern when automation can simplify, support, and speed up the process. 

“Two years ago we launched our marketplace in France. Through Asana we shared the different phases of the project with the lawyers, collaborated on work, and managed activities across France, Spain, and Italy without the different time zones impacting progress.”

Consistency delivers clarity over work in progress

Even though cross-functional teams have their own way of working, Asana improves visibility of tasks and identifies priorities. “We use the portfolio view to manage the workload within the legal department, because for each project we can see what’s at stake, potential risks, and the key details around it in a clean and clear way,” explained Amel. “Even though every project is different, Asana provides uniformity across how the team works, which links us all together.”

The Anatomy of Work Index suggests that clear, linked goals make it easier to work with stakeholders in other functions because employees are more likely to share information, ensure it gets to the right people, and keep key stakeholders informed. 

Reflecting on her experience of Asana Amel said, “Asana gives us an overview of all activities in a visual and easy to understand way. It’s really useful when it’s time to discuss budgets with directors, and to demonstrate how we’re optimising lawyers in their day-to-day work to our headquarters. We can also see when our colleagues are busy and if it looks like it’s too much, we can find a way to rebalance workloads within the team.”

A smart tool for the legal department

The regulatory landscape is constantly changing and Leroy Merlin is keen to leverage the knowledge and skills of all its legal talents to prepare for whatever happens next. As the Anatomy of Work Index shows, organisations that collaborate well are better prepared to adapt, which achieves a sustainable competitive advantage and grows their long-term revenue. 

“We have new consultants in Leroy Merlin who have been lawyers for 1-2 years,” said Amel. “In Asana we have created a project to capture and share our collective legal knowledge. If someone decides to leave the company we retain their experience so we can still learn from it.”

“Asana is such a powerful tool, and as Parliament continues to introduce new laws we know we remain in the best position to keep pace with change.”