In interview with The New York Times (NYT), Preeti Malani, an infectious disease specialist and chief health officer at the University of Michigan, states that it is very difficult to structure a single universal reopening plan, since the particularities of each sector or region must be taken into account. “Reopening is very complicated. There is no model, no handbook,” she says.

What care are we taking with employees during this period?

This week we brought Renata Filardi, Head of Human Resources at FQM, for a conversation about the challenges faced during the process of returning to the offices that the company is going through.

Read the full interview below!

Hello Clave friends, it is very good to have you all here with us. You are very welcome to another podcast.

Today we are here with a very special guest. Economist, executive coach, with a postgraduate degree in people management and in neuroscience, Renata Filardi. She has worked for over 20 years in the human resources field and is currently executive HR manager at Farmoquímica, but has also spent over 9 years at ABRH, where she served as director, vice president, and is currently part of the Board.

Renata, it is very good to have you here with us, it is a great pleasure. Welcome.

I am the one who thanks you, Ingrid, thank you very much for the invitation. It is always good to talk about the things we have been doing at work. Having this exchange is something really great that I think only enriches us. You are very well known and a partner, thank you for the invitation.

Well, let’s talk a little about the experience. We had a year that was not a very easy year, in fact, a year that no one had in their strategic planning, we had to reinvent ourselves, reinvent again, and now we are returning with some steps toward going back to the offices. So tell us, how was this decision-making process you went through, and what criteria did you consider in order to be able to carry out the return to the offices?

I think the technical part is the easiest part. Because defining a protocol, setting up a crisis committee, defining a protocol, having all the return-to-work actions, you can manage that on a day-to-day basis.

But I think the main point, the main pillar, is safety. Whether it is people’s health safety, mental safety, or financial security.

I think the first thing was people’s health—only those who truly feel safe to work are going to return to work. We work in a pharmaceutical industry, so I had areas that never stopped manufacturing at any point, and there were changes in terms of day-to-day safety. Things like taking temperature, wearing masks, changing the entire cafeteria, putting buses in place for people to commute because we didn’t have that transportation. So all of this technical part was done, giving safety to those who were already working in their day-to-day activities.

The back office staff worked entirely from home, so there was physical safety in being able to start commuting again—there was fear of commuting, fear of meeting people in the office, how I would handle meals because I used to eat at restaurants and I couldn’t eat at home.

All of this attention to physical and mental health was very important, and also financial safety, which meant: if you are not comfortable returning to work, you can stay at home because there will be no cut in benefits, no cut in salary. People working fewer hours also would not have cuts. So I think it is a tripod of safety: physical, mental, and financial. That is what we wanted to communicate all the time and we continue doing so.

Today I have people who are not working and could already be back, but they are not because they are afraid, or because they have an elderly family member, or because they have small children and schools have not fully returned yet. Will this person be left without support? No! They will continue working from home, and we will provide full support. But I also have a group that has already returned, and another group that cannot return because they are in a risk group but would love to come back. We have a whole scenario that we need to keep managing over time. But I think the main point is safety—whether mental, physical, or financial.

You mentioned several pillars and brought up some very delicate situations, such as risk groups and mental health issues. If you had to list them, what was the main difficulty found during the return-to-work process? What did you perceive as the most delicate situation?

In fact, there are three important points. The first point is communication. You need to be communicating all the time and telling people that we don’t know everything all the time, that we are building this together with everyone. Because this has never happened before, we have never gone through this experience. Nobody knows how to do it.

These were actions that were built on a day-to-day basis, and we might make mistakes. Some actions, like “we are going back today,” but if tomorrow contamination increases, everyone goes back home again—so this does not mean that from now on everyone is working in the office permanently, we may go back home again.

So I think communication—every day explaining what is happening and how it will happen, telling everyone that we don’t know everything, and especially having executives and HR themselves not as owners of the truth, because we think about some actions and they are not always the best ones.

We need to talk a lot with everyone. I think these were very important actions, realizing that each person needs to understand. And there is another point that I think is also very important, which is understanding that each person is different.

Now I cannot say: for me it is very easy to go back, it is not a problem for me, my daughters are 20 years old, they stay home alone, my husband is also fine, there is no one in a risk group and my mother lives in her own house, so for me it is safer. But I have people who do not have the same situation as I do, so understanding the context of all employees, understanding how they function, in order to have a more human and more personalized approach.

You mentioned, for example, that if things were going wrong, everyone would go back home. So what indicators were you monitoring in order to ensure the safety of this process?

First, we have people working all across Brazil. I have people working in factories that cannot stop, I have people working in the field with doctors, who are the representatives that do medical promotion, and for example, they visit hospitals and they were prohibited from visiting, because it is a high risk of contamination. I also have back office staff who work in the offices. These are different groups, and I need to map how contamination is in these three environments.

So in the field, are these people getting infected? Today there are already medical visits again—are these people highly exposed, how is this situation? So we monitor risk groups, age groups, pregnant women, family situations, who is suspected, who is not suspected, who is actually infected. We have this full perspective. We also look at cities, the contamination level in cities, to know: for example, in Bahia you can visit, but in Rio de Janeiro you cannot. And we do this weekly, reviewing and closing the data from the previous week in order to define the actions for the next week.

And the internal contamination level was very small. We currently have 1,500 employees and around 5% of the population got coronavirus, with the vast majority at the beginning, in the first two months when we had the highest peak. Now it is much more stable.

But this is a problem because when people return and get back into routine, they start letting their guard down and they no longer want to wear masks while sitting in the office, someone arrives and gives a hug, people want to stay together in the cafeteria, they all go to lunch together at restaurants—so people start relaxing the rules and then we may face a new increase in contamination.

We have to be communicating all the time, so that people remember. Just now I received an email from an employee in Pernambuco saying that this week there was a 22% increase in contamination in the city of Recife. “Guys, we need to wear masks, we need to do everything correctly.” So she herself proactively gathered the list of all employees and shared it. I said, wow, congratulations, Therezinha, you did great.

Let’s encourage even more communication. But that’s it—it’s something daily that we have to keep watching within ourselves. Because we ourselves can be the vector of contamination.

Let’s go. Do you have any tips you would give or lessons you have been learning? Because you yourself said: we are learning, right, we don’t have all the answers. What tips or lessons would you leave for companies that are now going through this return process?

I think that, in this sense, it is possible to return. As long as you have all possible safety measures in place, because that is important.

I think key points are: effective communication of everything that is happening, with the actions the company is taking, and communication about how we must not forget to act in daily life, because we see this constantly in the office—someone didn’t use hand sanitizer, someone took off their mask to speak, people gathering for coffee, and that cannot happen. This needs to be constantly reinforced.

For managers and executives, I think it is very important for them to put themselves in other people’s shoes, because we have different realities. I sometimes get into my car alone, travel alone, park in the garage, go up and sit in my office. It is much easier. But what about those who take a crowded BRT? Who take the train? Who take a bus? So you need to put yourself in the other person’s place—what about someone who has a small child and cannot leave them? In these cases, how do we act?

No, let them stay at home, home office, the person can develop their work in the best possible way. If it is in production, there is no way—the person has to go. But we need to provide full support so people can work. I think that is the main point: communication and listening to people, understanding how people are feeling.

Renata, thank you very much for this meeting, for this conversation, and for sharing your experience. I am sure that other companies, when listening to you, will feel at least that there are already some possible paths on how to know, how to start these first steps.

So thank you very much for your time, your availability, and your ongoing partnership. It is very good to have you here with us on the Clave channel.

I am the one who thanks you for being here and being able to talk a little about how we are working at FQM and learning every day. For us, who are experiencing this, it is fantastic because it is experience and learning, and from now on we will handle it with ease.

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