On board for Eurostar’s journey across cultures

When Nicolas Petrovic turned up at business school in 2003 to study for an MBA, he found that his group for the whole course was chosen by a computer to be “as dysfunctional as possible”.

Insead, based near Paris, had devised a team of two women and three men — among them a New York investment banker, a South Korean state banker, a German engineer and a Swedish diplomat — including Mr Petrovic, a Frenchman.

“You had to make it work,” he says. “But it was really hard.”

It was good preparation for the next stage of his career: to move to London to join Eurostar, which runs trains between Britain, France and Belgium. Before Insead, he had worked in Taiwan for Compagnie Générale des Eaux, and spent 10 years at SNCF, the French national railway company. He started at Eurostar as director of customer service, taking over as chief executive in 2010.

Eurostar is almost the definition of a cross-cultural company. Set up by the French, Belgian and British governments in 1994, it was run as three separate corporate entities, managed by the national rail company in each country.

“We co-operated, and communicated but it did not work well,” Mr Petrovic says. Indeed, Eurostar did not make its first net profit until 2011, a year after it was unified into a single company.

Since the UK sold its stake in 2014, Eurostar has been owned by SNCF, Belgium’s SNCB, Quebec’s pension fund, and Hermes, a UK infrastructure fund. Its 16-strong board, which is headed by British woman Clare Hollingsworth, is mainly British and French but also includes Belgian, Canadian and Australian members. The executive management team is equally diverse.

Mr Petrovic sees the size and diversity of the board as an indicator of success — “so many people want to join it” — and says the cultural differences are a strength. “French and British people, when they work together, they are complementary. The British are very pragmatic, very good financially — and they are more empowering, they give away responsibility more easily,” he says. “The French are more structured, they like to plan 25 years ahead,” he adds.

But Mr Petrovic, speaking at Eurostar’s headquarters next to St Pancras International station, does not play down the challenges of either the ownership or the staff structure.

“I enjoy having a diverse team. But the short-term effect can be tough,” he says. “At first everyone is very polite — but they don’t really engage, they don’t listen and actually understand.”

The main problem is, unsurprisingly, language and culture; British senior executives had to be told not to talk about television programmes they had watched or to tell in-jokes, because “it made the others feel excluded”. But at the same time, genuine disagreements are also too quickly attributed to differences in nationality, he says.

Mr Petrovic says he may soon ask the board to undertake the cross-cultural training programme that Eurostar provides to new joiners across the company, from senior management to train drivers and hospitality staff. A three-hour session covers topics such as “cultural baggage, concepts of culture, perceptions, challenging areas and cultural awareness levels”, and tries to help employees develop the skills to communicate effectively with strangers.

Eurostar asks employees every year to rate its cultural awareness and diversity; the latest score was a “very strong” 73 per cent. Senior executives are assessed on ability to overcome cross-cultural tasks.

One of Eurostar’s main challenges remains finding more non-French staff who speak the language well. The company’s working language is English, and 850 of its 1,700 employees are based at the headquarters near St Pancras.

To address this, Eurostar has its own language training school, teaching mainly French. Its planned customer service apprenticeships will include a French language component. It also sends drivers into English schools to teach French conversation.

Eurostar has changed the way people think about the relationship between the UK and continental Europe, says Mr Petrovic, and brought Paris and London closer in their “mental map”.

The ease of the journey between the two capitals, which comprises the bulk of Eurostar journeys, has led businesses to set up in both cities, Mr Petrovic says, and commute between them. Sixty per cent of Eurostar’s customers during the week travel on business. It will be laying on special trains for the Uefa European Championship, the football tournament that kicks off next month.

If Britain left the EU after the referendum in June, Mr Petrovic says, that ease of travel would not be lost. However, he is vehemently opposed to the UK leaving the bloc and reels off the benefits the EU has brought to Eurostar’s operations, such as standardised technical requirements and an independent regulator. “There is no upside [to Brexit] for Eurostar and a number of risks.”

In practical terms, he says, the biggest question would be the ability to carry out French custom and passport checks in London, and British checks in France. Other concerns are whether the number of workers in the City, who account for a significant number of weekday passengers, would shrink, as well as the fate of the big French and British expatriate communities in London and Paris.

Britain “turning its face away from Europe”, he says “for a lot of people, would be like a break-up”.

Mr Petrovic is well placed to measure the emotional as well as the practical ef­fects of Britain leaving the EU. Born in Paris to a French mother and Yugoslav father, he has lived in London for 12 years, al­though he frequently travels to his home country, in part to visit his son. As he says: “A divorce can be handled in different ways.”

Eurostar has had time to contemplate the possibility of Britain voting Out. But it has also had unwelcome recent experience of dealing with the effects of shock events. Terror attacks in Paris and then Brussels, as well as the intensification of the migrant crisis in Calais suppressed passenger numbers to just over 10m, with none of the expected increase on 2014.

Although terror attacks resulted in a big drop in bookings and journeys in the immediate aftermath, numbers recover quickly, Mr Petrovic says. “Business comes back first, then leisure. The last one to come back is always [travellers from] outside Europe. But within 12 months [the effect] has disappeared.”

Earlier, the financial crisis had led to a big push to attract leisure travellers from outside Europe. With non-European travellers making up about 15 per cent of all journeys, compared to less than 4 per cent before the crisis, there is more need than ever to enhance the ability of Eurostar staff to interact adeptly with strangers.