With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1425269
52 BCBUSINESS NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 L E A D E R S H I P Human Potential At Best Buy Canada, Carol Graziani has seen the permanent shift to remote work make employees happier and more productive– and strengthen the retailer's already robust diversity and inclusion efforts Not all B.C. companies needed a pandemic to show them the benefits of remote work. Take Best Buy Canada, which was moving toward a virtual model for its corporate staff before COVID pushed things along. "We were already starting to hear from our incumbents and from candidates that people wanted the opportunity for more flex- ibility," says Carol Graziani, the retailer's newly appointed director of diversity and inclusion. "So we were going there anyway in a more conservative way, and when the pandemic occurred and we really saw the potential of real, total free- dom and flexibility, we thought, Why would we want to go back?" Graziani says the change has been a success in several ways, with more collaboration across departments and a general uptick in productivity. "Now when you're online and you're tackling something together, it's quite focused and quite purposeful." Remote work has also given many employees the chance to move out of the Lower Mainland for more-affordable housing, as well as greater flexibility for per- sonal matters like family, medical appointments and exercise. "It's just a lot more, I'm going to say, human, even though it's virtual," Graziani says. "It leaves space for the humanity of everybody." Now that its 1,200-strong corporate team can mostly work from home, Best Buy is still going ahead with its move from Burnaby to a new HQ in Mount Pleasant. Scheduled to open next February, the building will give the company a bricks-and-mortar space for com- plex collaboration, team-building and vendor meetings. Though some staff might be happy never going back to the office, it's not one size fits all. "We also know that some folks do not thrive in isolation or may just need a change," Graziani says. "We see the new office as the flexible combination of 'me work' and 'we work,' when it makes sense." Excluding exclusion During her 15 years with Best Buy's human resources department –she was previously director of HR–Graziani has always advo- cated for inclusivity through edu- cation and other initiatives, with a focus on the LGBTQIA+ community. Her new role was created to unify steps taken by various parts of the organization–efforts that CLICKS AND BRICKS Having conquered WFH, Graziani and her colleagues will use their new Vancouver HQ (below) for in-person collaboration honest and transparent discus- sions with everyone about what they're experiencing and how we can help and support them. I would say it's a level of empa- thy and trust that you're trying to establish and grow with the people who work with you. Advice to leaders for the next "unprecedented" event… It's very easy to get over- whelmed. Prioritize your absolute most efficient time to do the tasks you have to do. I believe that people can do their best, most productive work in about two or three hours a day, and they're not doing their best work outside of that. Know what you're going to do the next day, the day ahead, at the end of the week. It's simply prioritizing your time in front of you rather than reacting to what's coming at you in that moment. What the future of leader- ship looks like… The most critical shortage in growing a business is people right now. And so for small organizations trying to scale and grow, our strategy can't be that we're just going to hire a bunch of people. We really must be critical with the calibre of individuals that we hire, because we're just not going to get there by hiring lots of people and filling a lot of seats. And it's not like we're trying to create extremely unique, tech- nical, differentiated positions that are filled by very specific people. They just need to be—I call them high-utility people, people that will find any way to get around a challenge, any way to get around an obstacle. –P.R.