Faculty – HHRR

WHOLE SCHOOL INITIATIVES

Faculty - HR

2020 will be remembered by all as the year that, as an educational community, a country and as humanity, we went through an exceptional, historical and exacting moment that put us face to face with enormous and diverse challenges that impacted each one of us in a unique way.

As a school, this challenged us and summoned us to be together while being far apart, to seek strategies to generate abundance in scarcity and learn together with our staff to navigate ambiguity and become friends with disquiet.

Our greatest challenge - but in turn our greatest strength - was to work remotely with the SASS employee value proposition. From Human Resources, we went back to the most essential conception of our role: for people to be well and at ease with their work and thus be able to give continuity to our school in a virtual context.

We genuinely wanted to get closer to the employee’s experience and we were able to react quickly by conducting a pulse survey that we called "#SASSFromHome". It thus emerged that one of the biggest challenges our staff had was balancing their personal life with their professional life, managing their time and dealing with the stress that hyperconnectivity entails.

For these reasons, our first semester was marked by adaptation, flexibility and wellbeing. We worked hard to generate proposals that could connect with the challenges and experiences that each family was having at home (online extracurricular activities, coaching sessions for leadership teams, school tutorials for our staff’s children) and allow us to help them get through this exceptional situation in a healthier way

Along these same lines, we carried out proposals we thought would help our people feel more emotionally contained and supported. We sought to generate memorable experiences and prepared a Wellness Day with talks and activities that allowed us to relax and connect to a playful mood. We celebrated Children’s Day with a virtual magic show, Teacher’s Day and many "Zoombirthdays".

We opened spaces for listening and dialogue (psychological containment network for our staff) and spaces for collective construction (Good Vibes Fridays led by the SEIL team). Through an initiative that we called "Hand in Hand with Human Resources" we proposed a virtual consultation space to be in fluid contact, honour people’s trust and register concerns and doubts.

To help our staff to better adapt their work to their home environment, we carried out a needs survey and organised the delivery of more than 200 "remote work kits" with different technological tools. Likewise, to accompany those essential teams whose work remained on-site, we arranged benefits for mobility and lunch.

Just as importantly, we took care of the physical health and the implementation of preventive measures which were necessary to prioritise and guarantee the safety of our employees. In addition to structuring a "Protocol of assistance in the face of the COVID-19 health emergency", we carried out continuous training for the staff to not only answer their questions, but also as a powerful tool to register their fears. Likewise, we mapped the health of our staff through a health survey that allowed us to quickly identify our population at risk.

Part of our strategy was to use digital processes to improve the HR experience of our employees. Thus, processes were redesigned and adapted to work online, and we accelerated the implementation of some initiatives that were already active: the launching of the digital receipt and the new release of the payroll management system, online training and an online recruitment process.

Detailed tracking of monthly savings in staff costs enabled quick decision making and reallocation of said savings to other critical initiatives.

During the second semester, once the initiatives focused on employee experience were already established, we focused on various strategic issues such as: budget management for 2021, involving the detailed analysis of higher costs, productivity and reorganisation of

structures, organisation charts, and the weekly participation in the meetings of different committees on salary policy issues and the organisation of teams for the return to face-toface classes in November.

Along these same lines, we made progress with key recruitments, with different agreements, and a consensus was reached with a compensation policy aligned with market data that included a general increase of 35% per year in three stages with some differential increases for key positions or by merit, that were very well received as a gesture of alignment with the country’s current scenario.

Along the way we were all transformed, we experimented, adapted and learned. We also realised that sometimes learning on the go may be the only option.

Indicators 2020:

Seniority average at SASS 10 years

Age average 43 years old

Headcount 434

Full time equivalent 342

% Women in leadership position 71%

Nº nationalities in staff 10

Turnover rate 10%