Remote HR – being there as a company for employees that are not. (Episode 81)
Interview with Raul Caballero, Human Resources Director (North LATAM) at Thomson Reuters.
In a post-pandemic world where people got a taste of working from home HR needs to be creative in how they approach what they do. Raul Caballero, Human Resources Director (North LATAM) at Thomson Reuters, is a great example of an HR professional who embraced the changes in how we work that Covid created.
Raul took the time to speak to me about how Thomson Reuters have changed its practices during and after covid.
Thomson Reuters believes that a company should care about its people. That might sound like an obvious statement, but it is not.
During the pandemic, Thomson Reuters offered a “pandemic bonus” to employees so that they could go out and buy an ergonomic chair, external monitor etc to build a proper workspace for home.
They also introduced ten days of Caregiver leave so that employees got time to take care of their sick relatives.
And they introduced a concept called “Flex My Way” where employees are allowed to work anywhere in Mexico four weeks per year and anywhere in the world (!) four weeks of the year.
Raul shared how people have used this opportunity to travel home to relatives and work from there, or how they have gone to some amazing places in Mexico so that they can go straight from work to the beach.
It’s a huge success with the young workforce of the organization. People can travel the world while they work. Raul himself is planning to “work from home in Italy” for 4 weeks in the near future as a way of extending a vacation trip to Europe. Raul shared that employees are proudly posting on LinkedIn about this opportunity. It makes them happy to be working for an organization that encourages this kind of freedom.
The approach of showing their people that they cared even when people were not in the office paid off. In the second year of the pandemic Thomson Reuters Mexico flew by its annual target and hit 175% average bonus performance.
I asked Raul to sum up the activities that they had implemented during the Pandemic into a mantra or a message. He gave me a big smile and said: “Happy people is good business!”
And then he laughed.
And so did I.
So obvious in a way. And yet so rare.
Creative HR is an HR department that realizes that the world of work has changed, and so too should the services that an HR department offers.
Remote HR is the practice of the company being there for their employees when the employees are not there.
The world of work has changed. It expanded. Has your HR expanded with it?
07
Feb