Anna Mindelöf, Universum's Talent Strategy Director

Anna Mindelöf, Universum´s Talent Strategy Director, continues to blog about her work with Universum’s employer brand. This time Anna has visited the US office and shares her reflections on change leadership and being visible as a HR Director.

A few weeks ago I visited for the first time our US office in Philadelphia. It was really nice and cool to sit on the 18th floor in downtown Philly. While I was there, we still hadn’t signed for our new office in Manhattan, New York. There were many questions around this: “Are we going to close the Philadelphia office?”; “When do we move?” etc. I couldn’t answer the questions then, but that’s not the point, instead we created an environment in which the questions could be asked and somebody listened.

A visible HR Director

One of my objectives as an HR Director is to be visible. It works quite well with Skype, e-mail and phone, but it’s not at all the same thing as meeting the employees in real life. Before the trip, I had sent out an e-mail inviting everyone, who wanted to have a meeting with me, to fix a time. I also booked a “come and have lunch with me” meeting for all employees who could attend. At that meeting, we talked about our culture, our values and how we could step out of our silos and become a better US team. It’s always nice to meet employees who are full of ideas on how we can improve things –what an engagement in our business!

I also went to the coolest bookstore in Philly and bought all the copies they had of the book “Who moved my cheese”; it’s about change leadership. How do you manage yourself through change and how do you learn that you choose your own consequences? Certainly; nothing happens exactly as you planned or thought and then it’s good to have some tools to handle such situations. Next time I’m in Philly, we’ll do role playing games and have a workshop on the book.

Diversity enriches

For many of our employees, Universum is either their first or second employment since graduation. However, we now have employed two people in the US office who both have about 20 years of work experience – an enormous reinforcement to the number of years of experience and competence! Diversity enriches. Moreover, about four weeks ago, we got a new Sales Director, a person who is going to take lead in the US.

Thanks to these new additions to the company, I’m looking forward to many new contacts and more business being done. Needless to say, it’s not just them who are going to get the work done and make sure it’ll be successful, it’s the whole US team who’ll do it together. I’m pretty sure they’ll be successful with some support from the global organization  – what most of us call HQ, I’m used to calling the “Service office”.

What do I want you to remember from my travel log?

• Set as an objective to be visible as HR Director, and by that I mean present
• Work with change leadership
• Work together in teams in the countries where you are present and try to avoid silos

From Good to Great and Excellent,

Anna