The importance of workplace experience to strengthen belonging and performance

We all want to feel like we’re in a safe space at work so we can bring our best to the table and perform well. But is there a one-size-fits-all approach to build a workplace that includes everyone? 
 
In this interview, Antoine Mercadal, VP Global Employee Experience, walks us through companies’ workplace culture, uncovering the secrets to making inclusion genuine and tangible down to the way you design your workspace.  

Before diving into your role as VP Global Employee Experience, I’d like to ask you what makes a workplace feel inclusive and safe for you as an individual.  

A workplace feels genuinely inclusive once people no longer spend their energy “editing” and “adjusting” who they are to fit in. It starts when inclusion becomes tangible in small moments.  

By promoting diversity, safe spaces drive impact and growth. Especially in global tech environments, where inclusion is about designing playgrounds that build differences and turn them into an advantage. Teams become way more creative, resilient, and performant when people with diverse backgrounds, expertise, identities, and lived experiences collaborate. 

At Criteo, two of our cultural values are Open and Together. To me, those are two of the strongest foundations of inclusion. We want people to feel that we value their unique personalities just as much as their skillset.  

What exactly is the Workplace Experience, and how do we approach it at Criteo?  

Workplace Experience is often misunderstood as office design or employee perks, when it is way broader than that. It’s the sum of all interaction employees have with their work environment — physical, digital, cultural, and emotional. It’s about how spaces feel, how teams connect, how technology enables collaboration, how leaders create trust, and even how people experience transitions, celebrations, onboarding, or difficult moments.  

Here at Criteo, we approach Employee Experience holistically. We oversee global events, workplace operations and transformation, and leaders support worldwide. All these dimensions contribute to building our people’s daily experience at Criteo. Workplaces today must do more than just host work; they must enhance connection, belonging, focus, creativity, and flexibility simultaneously, particularly in hybrid environments like ours.  

Research consistently shows that people thrive when workplaces offer both autonomy and opportunities for in-person connections. Our job is to make the office a place where people aren’t forced to go but want to go because that’s where they feel stimulated to learn and inspired to do their best work. That philosophy underpins everything we do, down to how we design workspaces at Criteo.  

In your experience, how do working environments impact individual contributors and teams? How does inclusion tangibly strengthen teamwork and spirit?  

A workplace has a direct impact on people’s behavior and performance as it can either boost energy or drain it. It can foster collaboration or unintentionally create silo, help people feel visible and valued — or invisible, just as a headcount number.  

One big mistake is to see inclusion is a “people topic” only, when it’s really a performance one. Performance increases in teams where people feel safe enough to challenge ideas, ask questions, admit mistakes, or share unconventional solutions. In inclusive teams, meetings are more balanced, collaboration feels more natural, conflicts are turned into constructive feedback, and teammates build each other up. Innovation rarely comes from environments where everyone thinks the same way or feels pressure to conform. 

Trust is the foundation of any safe space and, therefore, of all high-performing organizations. Our job is to give people the chance to build it by bonding and connecting during in-person gatherings, cross-functional projects, celebrations, and learning moments. It’s amazing to see how those experiences reinforce culture in ways neither technology nor AI could.  

Criteo has a long-standing commitment to inclusion. Do we succeed in reflecting it in our workplaces worldwide?   

That’s definitely our intention, and I believe we’ve made meaningful progress so far.  

What matters is that inclusion is not treated as a standalone initiative, but embedded into the way we hire, design policies, manage spaces, and support employees in their journey. Inclusion at scale requires continuous improvement. A global company like ours must evolve along with employee expectations, societal standards, and ways of working. We achieve that through promoting an open feedback culture where we involve our employees and collect their feedback on a regular basis. If there’s one thing I value at Criteo, it’s our willingness to listen, challenge ourselves, and adapt both globally and locally.  

Of course, we know that cultural context matters and that the experience of inclusion in Paris may differ from Tokyo, New York, New Delhi, or São Paulo. Yet, we share the same objective to create environments where people are supported and empowered to succeed everywhere.  

What are the biggest challenges you face? 

Finding the right balance. While flexible working has become one of the strongest expectations employees have, it doesn’t necessarily create connection, inclusion, or engagement. Hybrid work introduced incredible opportunities for accessibility, work-life integration, and global collaboration, but it also weakened social cohesion, bringing risks of isolation, uneven visibility, and fatigue due to back-to-back online meetings.  

Companies today must understand that culture won’t happen organically; you need to shape intentional experiences to foster it.  

That means asking:  

• What drives people to come together?  
• What moments truly benefit from in-person collaboration?  
• How to make sure employees have equal access to opportunities and information, whether they work from home or at the office?  
• How do we prevent proximity bias and the tendency, often unconscious, to give more visibility and opportunities to those who are more frequently present in the offices, or close to Leadership?  

The best workplaces today are not simply flexible. They are intentional.  

At Criteo, we focus heavily on creating spaces and experiences that equally support and value diverse types of work: collaboration, focus, creativity, social connection, and learning. We also recognize that flexibility must coexist with clarity. People need autonomy, but they also need rituals, shared moments, and a sense of collective identity and mission.  

There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to creating a safe space at work, but are there unavoidable must-haves?  

Of course! While inclusion may look different from one culture and individual to another, any inclusive workplace is built on: 

• Psychological safety: People must feel safe speaking up, disagreeing respectfully, asking for help, or reporting issues.  
• Accessibility: True accessibility means designing experiences proactively rather than reactively, for all types of needs.  
• Equity: Growth opportunities, visibility, and growth should not depend on location, personality type, physical ability, or work style.  
• Transparency. Inclusive workplaces communicate clearly, explain decisions, and create trust through consistency. 

Those are the fundamental principles that should influence everything, from workspace design to leadership behaviors, from meeting etiquette to any internal communication.  

Can professionals instantly spot the red flags of a non-inclusive workplace?  

Usually, yes. And some signs become visible very quickly, like when: 

• Only certain voices dominate conversations. 
• Flexibility exists in theory but not in practice. 
• Accessibility accommodations feel complicated or stigmatized. 
• Leaders are physically or emotionally inaccessible. 
• Employees hesitate to challenge ideas. 
• Culture relies heavily on unwritten rules and insider networks.  

Another important signal is who gets exhausted trying to adapt. In non-inclusive environments, the burden often falls on individuals to “fit in”, while it should be the organization’s responsibility to create equitable conditions for success.  

Inclusive workplaces do the opposite: they strive to reduce unnecessary friction, so people can focus their energy on contributing, collaborating, and growing.  

How do you make sure a workplace is safe for all typologies of profiles?

Inclusion cannot rely on assumptions.

Diverse populations experience workplaces differently, and the best approach is to combine listening, expertise, and intentional design. At Criteo, this starts with dialogue — through employee communities, feedback loops, local partnerships with Leaders, Managers, and Individual Contributors, and continuous communication and education.  

Then it becomes operational. We think about accessibility in physical spaces, meeting formats, digital tools, signage, lighting, acoustics, flexibility policies, and events design. We assess whether our environments support both extroverts and introverts, and if it fosters both collaborative and focused work styles.  

For LGBTQA+ employees, inclusion can mean visible allyship and environments where identity never feels risky. For neurodivergent employees, it may mean quieter spaces, sensory considerations, or clearer communication structures. For employees practicing different religions, it may mean prayer rooms, flexibility during observances, or inclusive food options at events.  

The key is understanding that inclusion is not one initiative. It’s thousands of daily design decisions fueled by genuine empathy and active listening.  

Can you share some examples of what we must consider when thinking of those populations?  

If we consider people with disabilities, their inclusion is one of the clearest examples of why workplace design must move from reactive accommodation to proactive inclusion.  

Historically, many organizations designed workplaces for an “average employee” and adapted afterward. Today, leading Employee Experience strategies aim to design environments that are inclusive from the beginning. On one hand, that includes obvious elements such as step-free access, adjustable desks, ergonomic setups, accessible restrooms, and assistive technologies. On the other hand, you must acknowledge less visible dimensions like acoustic comfort, cognitive load, meeting accessibility, captioning, navigation simplicity, lighting sensitivity, and, of course, digital accessibility.  

How do we tangibly make our workplace inclusive for everyone, and how do we measure it?    

One example is how we approach hybrid participation. A meeting is not inclusive if remote participants consistently feel secondary to those who are physically in the room. Technology, facilitation practices, and room design all matter; that’s why Workplace and Internal IT teams become best friends; we collaborate a lot on those topics.   

Another example is events design. Inclusive events consider mobility, dietary restrictions, sensory environments, caregiving responsibilities, participants emotional curve, and cultural differences from the start; not as last-minute adjustments depending on participants’ specific requirements.  

Whether through employee surveys, workplace utilization data, accessibility audits, qualitative feedback, retention, and engagement, we continuously measure impact. All these tools help us understand where we are succeeding and where we still need to improve. Ultimately, the best measure of inclusion is simple: can people fully contribute and grow without having to push barriers that the organization could remove?  

Everyone can build inclusion according to their possibilities and inherent constraints but making it tangible in everything we do should be the standard we all aim for.