By Ruvini Jayasinghe
The nerve centre of our country’s telecommunications, is Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) with a huge cross section of employees and millions of corporate and individual customers. Chief People Officer, SLT, Mr. Aruna Jayasekera spoke with BMD on the overload of challenges the company faced in providing their best service to their customers whilst ensuring safety of the employees during the pandemic and lockdown periods.
Excerpts from the interview:
Q: Give us an overview of your HR structure?
We have over 10,000 employees at SLT group of companies. With an infrastructure that connects our multiple services countrywide. SLT has 29 teleshops, 42 maintenance centres, 47 regional offices, and 12 franchise teleshops. Mobitel has 75 online dealers, 18 branch/mini-branch units, 42 SLT branches and 19 Singer Mega stores.
This network maintains the entirety of our services which are: Principal lines of business – Fixed ICT operations, mobile ICT operations, secondary lines of business, IPTV services and content creation facilities, human resources solutions, ICT infrastructure and system integrator solutions, directory services, digital marketing solutions, tertiary educational services, healthcare channeling platform, submarine cable maintenance, and software solutions.
Q: Give us an overview of your HR structure?
We have over 10,000 employees at SLT group of companies. With an infrastructure that connects our multiple services countrywide. SLT has 29 teleshops, 42 maintenance centres, 47 regional offices, and 12 franchise teleshops. Mobitel has 75 online dealers, 18 branch/mini-branch units, 42 SLT branches and 19 Singer Mega stores.
This network maintains the entirety of our services which are: Principal lines of business – Fixed ICT operations, mobile ICT operations, secondary lines of business, IPTV services and content creation facilities, human resources solutions, ICT infrastructure and system integrator solutions, directory services, digital marketing solutions, tertiary educational services, healthcare channeling platform, submarine cable maintenance, and software solutions.
Q: As an essential service what component of your staff report to work daily?
All our field staff are required to report to work daily in isolated bio bubbles to provide an uninterrupted service to all our customers. Our headquarters support staff and regional staff report to work on roster basis.
Q: What are the biggest HR challenges the pandemic has imposed on SLT?
A rapid policy change was the most immediate and urgent challenge. Change of course has now become a universal challenge in conducting business in this global pandemic, where lockdowns were imperative, imposing an overall new normal business culture worldwide.
The pandemic has enforced new demands and restrictions on management and employees. One key lesson we had to accept and learn to work with, is an element of TRUST especially in working from home (WFH). This has been a major business culture change and challenge for us at SLT.
The new normal pandemic infused work culture compromised our routine work mode and pushed us to greater levels and limits of performance and team work. Sometimes there was unequal distribution of work among staff, which was accepted and executed with a new and healthy team spirit, giving an optimum level of service to our customers during these difficult times, especially during the curfew and lockdown periods.
Communication took on a new dimension with a dire need for double quick communication during lockdowns. Our employees have realized and responded to the management’s requirement to communicate with employees at a new level of efficiency.
We experienced many unforeseen challenges in adapting to this new normal business culture, with the diversity of our human resources and the speed of their adaptability to a new digital culture.
Employees who work from home are provided laptops and are connected to our systems. Transition to a remote work culture has created complications, as some employees struggle to deal with the unfamiliar WFH routine and balance it with their daily chores at home. The lack of agility displayed by some of our staff working from home (WFH) has posed a challenge to our HR team. Keeping employees constantly engaged when working remotely in a crisis situation is an additional challenge and one of our priorities is to train our staff to adapt to the new digital WFH culture and work at optimum efficiency.
Besides staff mobilization and their safety in maintaining our best level of service to our customers in these difficult times, we also had in-house HR challenges with our annual routine HR procedures. There were obvious practical difficulties in implementation of some HR procedures like performance appraisal interviews for all categories of staff.
Q: How do the regional divisions operate during pandemic?
We have established provincial vigilant Committees (PVC) during the pandemic to ensure continuous and uninterrupted services to all regions. Our Regional Management is empowered to take decisions as per the prevailing situation and to decide on appropriate work arrangements whilst ensuring the isolated bio-bubbles concept. Transport is facilitated by the regional management for all regional staff depending on their individual requirements.
Q: What protective measures, procedures and facilities have been adopted by SLT during the pandemic for its staff?
Our employees’ safety is paramount during this pandemic, however our commitment to provide the best service to our millions of customers, even during the pandemic or indeed any other disruptive period of time, is our mission. This poses an extreme predicament for the management of SLT and its HR team in particular.
We ensure a continuous supply of PPE, face shields, IR thermometers, disinfectant liquids, hand sanitizers, disposable masks, reusable gloves and KN95 masks to all sales and operational staff of SLT PLC through our main stores.
Company funded transportation arrangements are in place for all staff to report to work. Approximately 2000 employees are vaccinated through the government vaccination programs to date. We facilitate PCR and rapid antigen tests on our staff regularly in a systematic method.
We have also established an automated face and temperature recognition and recording system for employees at the entrance to our offices. Safety measures, particularly regular disinfecting of office environment, provision of company transport to minimize or avoid use of public transport are also in effect. The isolated bio bubble concept that we have adopted works efficiently for our large network.
Work From Home (WFH), Work From POD (WFP) and Home to Field (H2F) arrangements are implemented to facilitate uninterrupted services. All pregnant officers are given the option of WFH or WFP. In addition, all employees are regularly provided with the health and safety guidelines to minimize the spreading of COVID 19.
Arrangements have been made to provide treatment to all employees and their immediate family members who have been identified positive for COVID 19, at Private COVID treatment centers managed by reputed private hospitals.
In house self-quarantine facilities have also been set up at our holiday bungalows in Poththodai and Anuradhapura which have been converted as self-quarantine centers for SLT staff.
We have enabled virtual learning processes (VLP) in order to facilitate the transition of staff to the new digital work culture. We have also established a security operating center (SOC) to minimize threats of possible cyber-attacks on the systems due to VPN facilities provided to employees to work from home and to ensure the safety of the information security system of the company.
While we have imposed a new work culture on a 10,000 strong staff to face the challenges during this pandemic, we have ensured that their performance and perks are not affected by this ongoing situation. We have facilitated online intern interviews, placements, online promotion interviews and other interviews via online discussions with relevant parties. Most importantly, we have provided them with a risk allowance and dry rations during this pandemic.
Q: How has the pandemic impacted your services and revenue?
We have actually been successful in our growth as planned and also generated new revenue streams, particularly due to high increase in the usage of data from online learning and accelerated usage of social media. We had to be on alert for possible cyber threats on the systems due to VPN facilities provided to employees. The lockdowns had a negative impact on the revenue collection of the company.
Q: How about recruitments and transfers etc. during these lockdown periods?
As mentioned before, we continued our HR processes even during the lockdown as planned. We have recruited 1800, employees of Human Capital Solutions (Pvt) Ltd who have been deployed in SLT. We have also implemented external recruitment of engineers, accountants, marketing officers, TTOs, IT & NW Officers / software developers. We are continuing with our ongoing process of offering the opportunity to recruit our current and retired employees’ children depending on their eligibility for vacant positions. We have also continued with our internal recruitments, mutual transfers based on employee request to nearest location to their residencies, work place rearrangement (nearest SLT place their home town) and temporary transfer arrangements to their home towns or current residences.BMD