On March 21st, Xenium’s President, Anne Donovan, participated in an HR panel discussion following the awards ceremony. Below are the questions and answers from the event:
How do you make sure managers have the tools and education they need?
Anne: Internally, we have a situational recap meeting so that the HR Business Partners can learn from one another and their individual experiences. The value in this is that you are not going to know what to do in a situation until you have actually experienced it—so we pool our knowledge. If we can share those best practices and experiences, that helps our team as a whole. We also feel like coaching the managers on these situations is the best tool.
What are your thoughts on Telecommuting in general? Are we seeing a trend? I think a lot of managers have been nervous about it for a long time and just getting comfortable, and now Marissa (Yahoo CEO) goes and turns it on its head.
Anne: At Xenium, we are actually a group of a lot of women, and a lot of us have young kids, so we have embraced the flexible work schedule—job-share and work from home when needed. It has worked really well for us.
I will say on the flip side, the best kind of communication is face to face. I can see the benefit of having some dynamic that allows for both. I think that a lot of us are so busy, and we want work-life balance, so I lean on the side of allowing that flexibility, that’s just been our culture and how we lead.
Anne Donovan answers questions during the HR Leadership Awards
Can you talk about the book club? I thought that was a great way to stay current and to keep the staff engaged.
Anne: Shout out to Tana Thomson, our Director of HR, she came up with the idea of the Xenium book club. She pitched it to the leadership team, and we have a really active group now. We purchased the books and they meet every 4 to 6 weeks to talk about those books. It’s a really engaged group, they bring the ideas back to their teams and their departments. It has facilitated the business side of HR because we are reading business books, not just HR books. It’s been really, really powerful.
And you guys buy the coffee too, right?
Anne: We buy the coffee!
Coffee and books go well together.