Lifting Up Our Most Important Assets
Sylvie is site director of Baxter’s plant in Meyzieu, France, joining the company in 2001 as a Production Manager. She leads a team of more than 500 employees manufacturing chronic dialyzers for permanent renal failure and acute therapies in intensive care, including products used in severe cases of COVID-19. Products made in Meyzieu Save and Sustain the lives of patients in 92 countries.
Q: What is the most important part of your job?
Sylvie: The most important part of my job is to ensure patient safety and quality in all we do. It's also important that our performance, as a team, is fully aligned with our strategic plan, adjusting as we go, providing support whenever it is required.
Q: Describe a typical day in the plant. How much time do you spend on the plant floor every day?
Sylvie: A typical day at the plant is organized around our tier meetings system which ensures that each associate checks performance versus plan, starts root-cause analysis when a gap appears and escalates issues for help when they cannot be solved within their team. I meet every day with the extended senior leadership team to track plant performance and identify where additional help may be needed to support the teams.
Q: How important are Baxter's shift supervisors/operators and other plant employees to Baxter's success? How do you keep them focused on Baxter's mission?
Sylvie: Together as a team, we, people, are the most important asset of the company. We are the ones making a difference to deliver high quality products, which save and sustain our patients' lives.
Our iCare program, which is a standardized approach to improving product understanding and moving to a patient focus on every aspect of our product quality, is an outstanding tool to reinforce the link between Baxter's associates and our patients. This year, more than 250 people have worked with a nurse onsite to learn about therapies our products deliver. More than 70 others studied renal failure detection with a nurse onsite. The positive feedback that we got after our World Kidney Day celebration is vivid proof of the strong link that our people developed with our patients.
Q: How important is diversity, equity and inclusion in your plant’s environment?
Sylvie: The thing I appreciated the most is that I don't remember my gender being a question. We just interact as a team, focused on our challenges and taking advantage of our diversity to deliver even higher performance. Today, I'm running a plant which proudly shows a 93 percent parity index* thanks to a great leadership team.
Q: What's the most fulfilling part about working at Baxter?
Sylvie: Apart from our very noble mission toward our patients, the way Baxter values leadership is the first source of motivation in my professional life. As a company, aiming at delivering top-quartile performance, our goals are clear and challenging. The opportunities to continue to learn and develop are numerous. That's certainly how 20 years have passed without really noticing!
*France uses this metric to evaluate parity in salaries, promotions, maternity leave and more.