Hrvatski Telekom wins Excellence in Challenges award

15.7.2020

Hrvatski Telekom is the winner of the "Excellence in Challenges" awarded by Selectio, the leading Croatian human resources consulting company, to companies that have shown that they manage human resources well and take care of their employees even in unpredictable circumstances.

The companies that won the "Excellence in Challenges" award went through the independent due diligence of their HR practices. The areas observed in the process were their agility and adaptability, the way they organize work and communicate with employees during the crisis, and initiatives launched to ensure the physical health, safety, and well-being of employees and the company's technological readiness for new ways of working.

Alongside Hrvatski Telekom, the winners are Addiko bank, CARNET, CEMEX Hrvatska, JGL, Luckia Hrvatska, McDonald's, Philip Morris Zagreb, PLIVA, and Poslovna inteligencija.

Hrvatski Telekom completely reorganized its business in under ten days to enable safe remote work from home for more than 4,000 of its employees, whose work enabled the continuation of uninterrupted communication and connection of the entire society. It required changing more than a hundred internal and external procedures, including providing working conditions from home.

Thanks to a quick switch to work from home in just five days, our customer service with almost 1000 employees was never inaccessible to customers.

At the same time, HT focused on preserving jobs and enabled workers from T-centers to work from home and perform a new type of work, which resulted in better cooperation and understanding. With daily internal communication, the company has provided full technical and advisory support to all employees so that they more easily adapted to the new situation.

All those who had to be at work due to the nature of their job were given all the prerequisites for their work to take place in completely safe conditions. The company purchased 178,000 gloves, 160,000 masks, and 11,600 antibacterial gels in the first iteration.

The technicians, whose work is to go out in the field and who had over 63,000 field trips in just over a month, were additionally rewarded. All employees of Hrvatski Telekom, whose homes were affected by the earthquake, received financial assistance through HT's "Foundation Friend" to more easily recover from the situation.

Extensive internal research has shown the highest employee satisfaction in the last 15 years, which confirms that employees appreciate the company's activities.

"The service provided by Hrvatski Telekom has been more important than ever before in recent months and has enabled the continuation of normal functioning in not very normal conditions. Faced with the coronavirus, we clearly defined what we need to do internally and externally. The safety and well-being of our employees was the starting point. Everything we did stemmed from our desire to ensure their safety, protect their dignity, value their work and effort, and respect their need for a balance of personal and professional life. All our employees have stepped up. Nevertheless, I have to point out our technicians. While we had the luxury of working from home, they were in the field every day, ensuring that people stayed connected. They are the reason all of us were able to work, children could attend e-classes, and families, despite the physical distance, could stay connected. They truly are silent heroes, because there is not much talk about the huge work they do, and their contribution is everyday and extremely important," said Ivan Bartulović, Chief Human Resources Officer of Hrvatski Telekom