Empowering Workforce With Post-Pandemic Human Resource Strategies

Christos Tsaprounis, People and Culture Director, Auto Trader UK

What are some of the major challenges in the human resources space, especially because of the last two years?

The fundamental aspect of any workplace is its people. So a strong and flexible People team is a must for meeting employees’ changing expectations, especially during any crisis. The last two years were no different as people teams were obliged to rethink and redesign their working models to help people cope with the changing work environment.

Some companies tackled the pandemic with a long-term shift to hybrid working models, and the People teams especially had to facilitate this shift by equipping employees with the right tools. Companies were seen exploring communication and collaboration technologies that offer more than audio, video, and screen sharing options, while many others integrated off-the-shelf solutions like Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

How did you revitalize employee communication and collaboration at Auto Trader?

We ensured connection and collaboration by employing Slack, apart from Microsoft Teams and tools like Miro. Slack has a simple user interface that helps employees share their whereabouts seamlessly, and it can integrate with our people analytics tool, Culture Amp, via which we facilitate our employee engagement surveys. Our internal communications team also integrated the Donut application—which seamlessly connects teammates on Slack—to further help colleagues engage in virtual chats between work.

Once the office reopened after the lockdowns and the initial pandemic scare, we ensured that when employees come to the office they were welcomed in a healthy and safe physical environment. So, our brilliant Environment team did a full refurb of our Manchester head office with greener and more collaborative spaces as well as technology to encourage positive participation of people at the workplace.

As a People and Culture Director, do you see any positive changes with the use of instant communication tools?

Using instant communication tools in businesses has definitely changed workplace collaboration for good. Real-time messaging platforms might not be new, but it has created new opportunities in terms of knowledge and information sharing between colleagues. This has resulted in more open communication, immediate feedback, and instant updates. With this, I believe, workplaces are able to achieve more than just complying with formal chat and discussions in meetings.

With the new-age communication tools, we are also addressing differences in people’s preferences and accessibility requirements more than anything. For instance, companies have the liberty to choose platforms that are accessible for people with certain needs and create more inclusive work environments.

Saying that we need to be mindful of some of the pitfalls of instant communication tools that can be used 24/7. Need to set some guidelines around their usage and expectations about responding out of hours to allow people the chance to properly switch off from work.

How do you plan and strategize an employee engagement project?

Plans and strategies differ based on the scale of each project we are undertaking. As a  leadership team we provide strategic direction in line with the wider business strategy, and we collaborate with people across teams and functions to incorporate a plethora of thoughts and voices.

Our inclusive nature offers everyone across the People team a chance to lead based on their passion and desire irrespective of hierarchy. We also collaborate with people from across the business to ensure an agile execution of employee engagement projects. For large scale projects we have the support of our fantastic Delivery team.

Could you mention any of your initiatives that have helped your leaders in people management?

Leaders’ behavior largely impacts employee productivity and more importantly wellbeing. On this account, our last year’s Inclusive Leadership Program focused on leaders receiving feedback through a 180 questionnaire from those they lead. Working in small cohorts of leaders, it helped more than 200 of them to interact with each other and learn from their experiences on how their leadership impacts teammates. This self-reflection helped the leaders to contribute to the company’s inclusive culture.

What is your advice to the leaders and directors looking to improve their HR strategies?

Diversity of thought is key while designing and delivering employee engagement initiatives. Employee engagement initiatives should not be confined to a specific group, but expand to all the people across an organization, making it thoroughly inclusive and make sure you have good representation from different voices. Moreover, leaders should stay close to everything that is happening outside their business to deliver prompt solutions. This is because we don’t operate in an organisational bubble; everything that happens in the world locally and at a global scale will impact your people so as leaders we all need to stay well informed.

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