After helping clients through crisis, TELUS employer solutions is rolling out key tools for our "big reset"
After a year of managing crisis after crisis, HR leaders can use the end of this year and the start of the next as a moment to rethink processes, assess their toolkit, and reflect on how the lessons learned through 2020 can shape HR strategy in future. They should do so knowing, as well, that other leaders in the HR space have already been thinking about what will come next.
Jose Dino spent the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada helping organizations. The General Manager at TELUS Employer solutions told the story of how his team leaned on their own longstanding flexible remote to help their client’s transition to remote. After a year of managing the pandemic, he and his team have scaled up their service offerings and made some of the solutions key to their efficient internal operations available to external clients. It’s a solution set that Dino believes will stand HR leaders in good stead through 2021 and beyond.
“During the pandemic, our learning solutions were absolutely key for employees,” Dino said, when asked what tools were especially useful this year. “Employees could take their additional training remotely. They also had access to a survey tool we use, which was important for discovering how employees felt. As well, they relied on our performance development solution that enables managers and team members to work on a coaching model and talk about working objectives and priorities.”
While success in the early days of the crisis was built on maintaining connections over distance, other solutions in the TELUS suite will prove themselves necessary in the coming months. Dino explained that TELUS’ in-house online reservation system can serve organizations as they conduct partial re-openings and need to ensure office space is appropriately laid out. This year his team retooled their internal booking system for external use, allowing organizations to ensure physical distancing in their reopened offices.
Within that booking tool is a reporting functionality that, Dino explains, allows not only for accurate record keeping, but contact tracing in the unfortunate eventuality of an outbreak or a positive test. As organizations face new legal and compliance requirements to reopen and keep functioning, these sorts of tools can save risk, hassle, and paperwork for HR leaders.
Beyond just the practical, Dino and his team have been working on the intangible. Many organizations have seen their cultures suffer for lack of a shared workspace. Dino and his team at TELUS Employer Solutions are pulling, again, from their own experience as a remote-first workplace to help their clients reset culture and reinvent their HR strategy. Technology will play a crucial role in that culture and Dino says his team is focused on helping their client organizations understand this technology and incorporate it in a way that serves their culture.
Dino says that while their new solutions have been shaped somewhat by the lessons of 2020, his team hasn’t lost track of everything good they did before. He stressed that with almost two decades of operations behind them, his team’s tools and solutions can be built with a mind to recent crises and long-term trends alike, while maintaining a focus on culture and longevity.
“We've been in business for nearly 20 years and we've dealt with so many different organizations, whether they're large public sector entities, or private sector retail organizations,” Dino said. “I think we bring experience working with so many different types of clients and our own experience as a recognized top employer to our solutions. So see that in what we offer on the talent management side, and in our workplace management.
“The tools are not just the tools, either. They come with our engagement and our support. Clients get our expertise, earned with so many other types of clients, so that when we implement a solution we have answers to any question they may have.”