A sustainability driver

By Corinne Päper – For the heavily pregnant Gianina Viglino-Caviezel, Director HR and Sustainability at Hamilton, the past few weeks have been far from easy. While other industries were switching to short-time work in April 2020, the life science and med-tech company was expanding its production line and hiring new staff in order to satisfy the enormous demand. “We had to find a lot of new staff very quickly”, states Gianina. To achieve this, the 27-member HR team used all possible channels – “from traditional advertisements to online campaigns and word-of-mouth recommendations”.

The people of Bonaduz, in the canton of Graubünden (Grisons), showed great solidarity. “Many of the people who responded to the 140 advertised positions were even offering to work for us voluntarily. This included students, dentists and retail trade staff. Due to the newly established priorities, many projects have been delayed or placed on hold such as the renovations to the cafeteria or recruitment for non-systemically relevant roles. However, the additional work has brought the staff closer together. “We were all proud when the Swiss Confederation’s Super Puma helicopters landed in front of our building to collect the ventilators.”

Slowly, life at Hamilton is returning to normal. The cafeteria renovations are proceeding and employees are gradually returning to the office after working from home. “If all goes well, everyone will be back on site by July.” By that point, Gianina will already be on maternity leave until December 2020. In the interim, however, she will not “completely vanish from the face of the earth” but will continue to support her HR team with its pending projects. “It will be a gradual return.” For Gianina, combining a family and a career poses no problem: “Following my maternity leave, I’ll achieve 90% capacity over four days. My husband is also reducing his working time. Moreover, we will be assisted by our families, who also live locally.”

Step by step towards greater sustainability

Her maternity leave has been carefully planned and her team’s tasks and duties were allocated some time ago. Indeed, there will not be any less work when she returns and she has a long list of projects. Could you give an example? Implementing the sustainability focus area. A term that is often thought to conflict with economic business. But not for Gianina: “It’s about refraining from using natural resources in quantities that exceed their capacity for regeneration, aligning this with the core competencies of a company and using this as a strategic advantage.”

To this end, while studying at the Institute for Economy and the Environment at the University of St. Gallen in 2017, the then 30-year-old developed a business model for her dissertation, which she is also using in her current position. “Step by step, Hamilton is moving towards a more sustainable future and has already laid the first foundation stones for this. We’re not starting from scratch.” The company already uses only groundwater for heating and cooling and has installed solar panels on the company buildings in Bonaduz and Domat-Ems. Furthermore, it has installed an electronic façade on the new building, which is expected to reduce the air conditioning and lighting costs by up to 25%. The staff catering will also be provided in a more environmentally friendly manner in future: “This will help to make sustainability a more tangible topic for many people.”

Being able to ask for assistance

Since Gianina was a lateral entrant to HR, her staff often have greater specialist knowledge of HR than she does. But she isn’t fazed by this: “A manager does not need to know everything and requires different skills to those of her staff.” For example, to keep encouraging and supporting them, to provide an impulse, or to remove an obstacle from their path. If there is something Gianina does not know, she will ask for assistance. “So far, this has always been very well received by her staff. They are very helpful.”

Above all – thanks to her long-term career as a consultant and as a company founder – Gianina brings strategic thinking to her team, alongside her experience of project work and of structural and process optimization. She considers it an advantage that such varied competencies converge in the HR team: “It would be unfortunate if we all had the same strengths. In this way, we can complement each other.” And yet wherever there is huge variety, there is also friction. Dealing with disagreements is in Gianina’s nature: “I don’t gloss over a situation. My staff must know where they stand.” In this respect, it’s not what you say, but how you say it. In interacting with her colleagues, she places great importance on respectful cooperation. This means treating people on equal terms and respecting other opinions. “For me, everyone is of equal importance, irrespective of the role they currently hold.”

If a company is growing, then the organizational structures will change. And it’s no different in Hamilton’s HR department. “It’s an ongoing process”, Gianina says. In this respect, she is focusing particularly on the transition towards greater use of digital technology. “We need to think about which processes can be automated more, when and where we need more human input and how we can adapt our existing processes to the rapidly growing company.” For example in recruiting, where questions arise such as: what can we do online and what can we do offline, and how can we shape our recruiting process to match each employee profile? But there are also questions like: what will a future specialist career or apprenticeship at Hamilton look like, and how can the HR department bring more of its strategic HR perspective into the business?

Business creation is in her blood

Entrepreneurial thinking was virtually ingrained in Gianina while she was in the cradle, as her mother ran a fashion business for almost 40 years. During her studies, she was already working alongside her in the business, assisting with sales, developing marketing strategies and advising her mother on financial matters. Hence, it was just a small jump from assisting in her mother’s business to setting up her own. Gianina’s chance to set up a business came when she began her master’s degree at the University of St. Gallen (HSG) in 2011: “From as early as my time working at PwC in Zurich, I realized that many SMEs and start-ups were unable to afford the services of the large management consultancies.” So an idea began to emerge, whereby business students working on a voluntary basis could be trained to provide the same consulting services for startups and SMEs – but at a lower price and with sustainability as a linked theme.

What began with Student Impact, as a small project developed in tandem with a co-student, rapidly transformed into a showcase project, for which Gianina received one of 200 “Outstanding Global Leaders of Tomorrow” awards from the University of St. Gallen. She even caught the attention of the World Economic Forum (WEF), which appointed her as a member of the Global Shaper Community. During that same period, in 2017, one of the projects she was supporting – the first electric truck in Switzerland – was brought into the limelight as the year’s best consulting project in the Next Generation category.

Return to Graubünden

Five years later, Student Impact 2017 is still active and growing bigger. It was time for the 30-year-old to hand over the reigns as managing director. “I wanted to establish the company on the market and then find a successor.” This was achieved quickly, with the position going to a long-time Student Impact colleague. Numerous public appearances on the topic of sustainability and a further year at a consulting firm would then follow for Gianina, before she fulfilled one of her heart’s desires: She returned to her home canton of Graubünden (Grisons). For Gianina, the fact that she is now able to live and work there feels like winning the lottery!