Naleena Gururani,
Chief People Officer, Hyperoptic
For Naleena Gururani, Chief People Officer at Hyperoptic, company purpose "unites the HR function in many ways". She shares with myGrapevine magazine how employee experience...
Words by Kieran Howells
Naleena Gururani’s impact on Hyperoptic in her three years at the helm of its HR team has been significant. She’s led the company through the challenges of the pandemic, through transformation and through growth, and despite these challenges, her commitment to providing a positive employee experience, with an emphasis on culture and purpose, has remained strong.
In fact, so committed is Gururani to ensuring that workers feel a sense of purpose and connection, that the company was this year named as a Great Place to Work. To find out how she helps to provide purpose at Hyperoptic, how the pandemic changed the role of HR in delivering purpose to workers, and what role she thinks environmental and social governance has in delivering purpose, read on below...
"I started out my career as an economist, and it’s really a very happy accident that I ended up in HR"
Yes absolutely. We’re a comparative newbie – ten plus years in the business. What you could say is that, objectively, we put fibre in the ground and connect customers to quicker broadband. But is that our mission? Why do our people get up in the morning and go to work happily? We want to connect Britain. We want to ensure that the UK has the best broadband humanly possible, at the best prices possible. That’s not about laying cables in the ground – that’s connecting communities. That’s bringing families together. That’s businesses being able to operate faster and more efficiently.
In the pandemic, we had vulnerable customers stuck in remote parts of the country. In lockdowns, they had very little connection with the outside world. So, our engineers were going out in very extreme circumstances, with Covid-19 at large, to help those customers. They believed that, even putting themselves in danger, was worth it to help people who needed it. We couldn’t ask people to do that; it was their sense of purpose, their moral responsibility, that got them out on the front lines there.
Great question. That’s what creates a potential gap. Purpose is not created by a group of leaders sitting around a table in a conference room. There are two aspects here. The first is to ensure that your engagement channel and your communication channel are running at the same time. You have to get the feedback on what’s happening in the business directly from the employees who are living it. They are the ones telling us why they come to work every day. So, you take that feedback, and you put a narrative around it, which comes directly from the business. You define what your vision, purpose, values are. That becomes your culture. These communication and engagement channels need to be present at each and every level of the business. You’re threading in feedback, based on the narrative you’ve created, back to the people who told you what it should be.
Secondly, you need to measure it. We ask our employees little and often how they’re feeling about their sense of purpose, about their happiness and contentment. That data is looked at regularly by the leadership team to ensure that what you define as your purpose is being lived. That people feel it every day and care about their role.
"One of the things I’m proudest about is that we have been certified this year as a Great Place to Work"
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