Unique Contributions

Culture and the future of work

• RELX • Season 2 • Episode 9

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How do you build a workplace culture and why does it matter? As business leaders grapple with retaining talent, inclusion and wellbeing, building a culture centered around purpose is top of mind.

In this episode, YS Chi speaks with Rashelle Cejo, vice president of human resources for LexisNexis Asia and RELX shared service centre in the Philippines. The centre, known as REPH, is one of the fastest-growing business facilities by headcount with over 4,000 employees in Manilla. As the very first hire for REPH in 2010, Shelle has first-hand experience of the growth story of the centre. She shares her insights on the initiatives that have contributed to REPH receiving a number of global recognition awards for best employer brand and reflects on creating a sense of purpose, giving back to the community and the future of work.

This podcast is brought to you by RELX.

YS Chi:

The Unique Contributions podcast is brought to you by RELX. Find out more about us by visiting RELX.com

Rashelle Cejo:

I think it's all about the people. The key to sustain any business is to look at the most important resource, its people. I'm proud to say that it has been our people that has been our ambassador.

YS Chi:

Hello, and welcome to our second series of unique contributions, a RELX podcast where we bring you closer to some of the most interesting people from around our business. I am YS Chi and I'll be exploring with my guests some of the big issues that matter to society, how they are making a difference and what brought them to where they are today. My guest today is Rashelle Cejo, who is vice president of human resources for LexisNexis Asia and RELX Shared Services Centre in the Philippines. The centre which is known as REPH, is one of the fastest growing business facilities by headcount with over 4000 employees. Shelle was our first, very first Filipino hire for REPH in 2010 and has first hand experience of the growth story of the centre. I'll be asking Shelle about the challenges she faced growing REPH from the ground up, about the importance of culture and corporate responsibility and human capital trends in the post Covid world. Shelle thank you for joining the podcast. It's great to have you with us today. You're based in Philippines. Can you tell us a little bit about how things have been over there during the last few months?

Rashelle Cejo:

Thank you YS. It is my pleasure to be here and I'm deeply honoured to be sharing my story with you all. It has been a year since we were in lockdown here in the Philippines. The past year has been challenging given the pandemic but it has also helped us to be resilient and agile in so many things, especially in our personal and professional life. In fact, what I can share is that I have developed a habit of binge watching, or marathon viewing of movies and TV series. I have also loved the experience of being a technical support for my daughter, who is currently engaged in an online learning. In terms of the business, we are still working from home because we are very much mindful of the current situation in the Philippines. Especially since the majority of our employees are taking public transportation. But overall, if you'd asked me, everything is doing well.

YS Chi:

That's good to hear that it's turning up. Is vaccines being distributed now in the Philippines?

Rashelle Cejo:

Yes, vaccines are being distributed. But the elderly and the healthcare workers are actually prioritised by the government. We hope that in the future, we will be able to have all of our employees vaccinated as well, including their family members.

YS Chi:

That will be terrific. Shelle, you grew up and you studied law. Then you came through multiple experiences to RELX in HR. Why were you first interested in the law? And why did you move into HR? I love your story.

Rashelle Cejo:

As a child, I love reading books and watching movies about the law because I am amazed about the profession, and what it can do to help people. In fact, when I was in elementary and high school, I have been involved in student organisations. I was part of the student government and also school politics. And that opened my eyes to what I really want to do. And that is to stand up for one stride, help people find justice and be their voice. So when I was in college, I took up legal management as my bachelor's degree. I had my internship at the Regional Trial Court, then immediately I went to law school. On my fourth year, I got the chance to work for one of the top premier law firms in the Philippines. It's Accralaw. I worked there as a paralegal. This experience I really value because it opened my eyes to different realities. But looking back, I probably was too idealistic on how and what the law should be, or how it should be practiced. It's not what you always expect to be or what you read in books, or even see in the movies. Plus at the time, I also wanted to try different things, like I was doing events management, training people. So I went out of the law firm and the first job that I got was in human resources for a local hospital. I was tasked to focus on employee relations. But I also got interested and at the time I ventured into other facets of human resources. I was hiring for doctors and nurses, and that particular job in the hospital. But what I want to share is actually the first multinational experience that I got. That was with GlaxoSmithKline. I was then part of the merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham in the Philippines. I stayed there for five years, and that was actually the place where I tried different facets of HR, like recruitment, employee relations, compensation and benefits and learning and development. I think that's when I finally realised that I could embark on this new career path and get serious and do good at it. At the time generic drugs came in the Philippines, and pharmaceutical company got affected. But that was also the time when the business processing services and shared services came into the Philippines. That was called the sunshine industry of the Philippines.

YS Chi:

Wow, I love that expression, sunshine industry. Tell us a little bit more about what that means. I think I can guess at it. How has the industry shaped the country as a whole?

Rashelle Cejo:

At the time YS, it was just the the global financial crisis. The Philippines really needed something to hold on to, to survive the economic conditions. So the BPO was considered as the sunshine because it has been at an increasing growth. Even with the current pandemic situation, it saved our economy. When you talk about the BPO industry, and the shared services industry, we are not just talking about the back office or call centre support. We also talk about the information technology, knowledge process outsourcing, game development, engineering design, medical and legal transcription. So it is a sunshine industry because it gave a lot of job opportunities for a lot of people in the Philippines. I know to date we have 700 BPO's in the Philippines. It is the largest sector of employees that has given a lot of jobs to Filipinos.

YS Chi:

It's pretty appropriate though. For the listeners who don't know the term BPO, it means business process outsourcing. For a country that emphasises so much about education. The country has tremendously educated population. This is just so appropriate, isn't it?

Rashelle Cejo:

That is correct YS. In fact, the reason why the BPO has been very successful in the Philippines is because of the number of graduates that we produce, and the kind of talent that we can give to our partners overseas.

YS Chi:

Right. I remember the first time I visited you in, 2013 or 14, and as I was walking by you were serving customers in multiple languages. I said, wow. I'm hearing everything from, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Bahasa, Spanish, French. It was quite striking to me.

Rashelle Cejo:

That is correct YS. The industry is not just on the side of the business that is transactional. It has grown beyond that. So we provide bilingual services and now we are venturing into what we call the knowledge process outsourcing. More complex kind of roles, and more on the higher level kind of engagement with our stakeholders.

YS Chi:

That's right. We're going to get to that a little later, because certainly REPH does not sound like a BPO at all. It's so much more advanced than that. Well, let's dive deeper into your role at RELX first. You were initially hired to build out a shared service facility for our LexisNexis business unit with 500 employees. Can you tell us a little bit about those very early days? How did you attract the best talent, while other companies that have much more brand profile than we do. Big names and better recognised names were all around you in that business park. They were all global brand names and yet you attracted some great people.

Rashelle Cejo:

When we first established LexisNexis shared services, we looked for an area where we can get the talent. And where we are located now is the U.P. TechnoHub, which is actually right in front of the University of the Philippines. As you mentioned, this is also a site or a hub for other multinational companies, such as HSBC, IBM. We have Convergys, Concentrix and TeleTech. These are big names in terms of what we call captive shared services. LexisNexis is not a consumer brand. It is known in the legal community and the academe, but definitely not the general public. So we needed to develop a good marketing and branding strategy based on who we are as an organisation and what we do for the community. And when you build a team from ground up or from scratch, you really need to understand, the mission, vision and purpose of the organisation. We needed to think of ways on how we can establish a culture or ways of working, which is very much aligned with the direction of the organisation. So when we were recruiting for LexisNexis, we tried to look at what is the main purpose of recruiting for legal professionals in a company? So we even have this job advertisement and we said that, do you want to advance the rule of law? Join us. Or something like that. Because we know that if we get the right talent, we don't just stop there, we must engage them. We find them a purpose, so that we are able to retain them for a long time within the company or within the organisation.

YS Chi:

Which you have done. And again, we're going to get to that a little later. Shelle, internally for RELX also and for LexisNexis. It must have been challenging because Philippines was not known to be one of those global customer support centres. When there are places like India and China, I'm sure people didn't think of Philippines as a natural place. What were some of the challenges you faced to try to educate internally?

Rashelle Cejo:

Yeah, you are absolutely correct YS, we did experience a lot of challenges. To establish a captive or internal shared services is not an easy journey. The main reason for setting up a site is all about cost savings, labour arbitrage. When we do that, people's job will always be impacted one way or the other. And so we had to experience transition, and some of it is quite painful. We experienced a lot of pushback during the early days. We got questions like, where is the Philippines in the map? Do you even speak English for you to manage a call centre team? Or what's the educational system like? So we had to go back and explain to people about who we are as a country. We told them that we were an American quality for close to 50 years. That when they visit the Philippines, they will see that it has a Western influence sculpture. We have college graduates here. And sometimes there was an opportunity for me to show them some record from the government showing that our problem is more of underemployment versus unemployment, because we have more college graduates than jobs. We had to go through that experience because some of the transitions and training discussions have been challenging. There was really a need for us to orient or educate our colleagues about the country before we reached this point were in, where were considered to be shared services for RELX as a whole. So in a nutshell, we really have to gain their trust and confidence.

YS Chi:

Which you did, because once success stories we're shared and others were enticed, it was almost a tsunami, wasn't it? The initial plan was to hire 500 people, and that obviously was exceeded by eight times now already. Now you're covering all of RELX's business units as well as RELX itself. Now, in order to do that, obviously you had to retain people and make a culture of excellence work while having fun. Tell me a little bit about culture that you help foster? How is it that we can get such incredible satisfaction scores and recognition from outside world as a great place to work?

Rashelle Cejo:

Yeah, establishing a great people and culture strategy is really the key to sustain the business of people and services. That has been one of the objectives of attracting and retaining talent for RELX and especially for existing in an industry like what we have right now. We've talked about how we engage people. One of the things that has been on top of my mind is, how can we lure a lot of millennials to work for the organisation? But at the same time, how do we remain true to our mission and values as an organisation? I remember when I was being interviewed for the job, I was asked by Alex Watson. He said, what corporate social responsibility engagement can you help or build in the Philippines that we can grow, as we grow the organisation? So that has been a constant reminder to me. From then onwards it was always a challenge to create an engaging work environment, and helping people find their purpose within the organisation. It's not just attracting and retaining but engaging them at its core. What makes them feel fulfilled in an organisation and be proud of the company that they're working for.

YS Chi:

It's a very young team, isn't it?

Rashelle Cejo:

Yes, very young.

YS Chi:

And very eager to learn and to continue to grow?

Rashelle Cejo:

That is correct. Yeah, we have very young employees who are always fired up to do a whole lot of things. And sometimes, human resources or the team just needs to wait for the employees to come up with all of this ideas. If I may share, last year we were thinking about how do we do RE activities in a virtual world. I think it was not a challenge for some of our circles and even our ERG's because they did came up with a lot of activities. Even getting us a lot of RE cares donated time, even in a virtual work environment. They were helping communities, virtually raising funds to get more PPE's for the frontline workers, or even donating groceries to the communities that we support. The pandemic didn't stop the energy, the passion, the engagement of the people. In fact, it has challenged us to be more creative in terms of doing something that has never been done before, because of the unprecedented situation. But still, we delivered and we can fulfill or rather see and feel the engagement of the people.

YS Chi:

Yeah, I'm glad you didn't make me sing for that fundraiser. You were recognised by World HRD Congress as Best Employee Engagement Company of the Year, and also Global Best Employer Brand. What a pride for the team. Tell us a little bit about what you think are the underlying qualities that have earned you these recognitions?

Rashelle Cejo:

I think it's all about the people. The key to sustain any business is to look at the most important resource, it's people. You may see that we have not spent much in terms of marketing and branding. I'm proud to say that, over the years it has been our people that has been our ambassador. The reward and recognition that we have gotten over the years is actually a testament of how our employees are engaged in different events and activities. Somehow it got the attention of people looking at our website, our social media campaigns. And the sweetest part of it is when they recognise that its best employer brand, together with the other popular brands. And of course, the employee engagement of the year, which is truly a testament of what we have done over the years that I think would really help in terms of not just attracting retaining talent. But also making them be engaged in what they do and continuing it. So my best answer to that is really all about the people being engaged, and being great ambassadors of the organisation. Nothing beats that.

YS Chi:

So just one more question around what we do. Shelle, as we look to the next few years, what are some of the areas in which REPH is really focused on excelling in and innovating?

Rashelle Cejo:

That's a very good question YS because we are now celebrating our 10th year, and our focus is about future of work and the next state maturity model for the organisation. We're looking at several ways in terms of bringing us up to the next level, like process excellence automation, artificial intelligence. All of those things are part and parcel of the kind of growth that we are looking at. But more than that, this particular situation. The pandemic, us working from home, also gave us the opportunity to step back and think of ways and how we can utilise this experience of ours to deal with the next phase of our growth. Right now we're discussing about, okay, we have proven that people can be productive and efficient and even be creative in a work from home set up. So can we now develop a hybrid type of work where people can work from home and work from the office? How can we have more flexibility, in terms of the work that we do now that trends and technologies is really geared towards worthwhile online information and technology? How can we move it up another notch and make sure that we have more opportunities for growth in the IT space? Can we hire more data scientists and analytics, folks who can help serve the different divisions that we have? So we're looking at the workspace. We're looking at the talent models that we have, and we're also looking at how can we upskill and upgrade the kind of talent that we have within the organisation. It's all about the future of work.

YS Chi:

In that future of work, do you see more collaboration opportunity, even when we are not physically together?

Rashelle Cejo:

Yes, certainly. In fact, one of the things that we have discussed. Is there a possibility for us to focus our office space as an area for a collaboration type of space versus conference rooms, hotelling type for leaders and employees. So that at least the trend is not just having a physical work office for each and every employee. But there is flexibility around office spaces, and utilise the space for more connection and collaboration meetings.

YS Chi:

But you would be very good at this because you have been 1000s of miles away from your collaborators all over the world in Lexis and RELX, and you've done such a marvellous job.

Rashelle Cejo:

Well, hopefully we will be successful so that we can continue the kind of support that we have, or that we offer to our stakeholders.

YS Chi:

We cannot have this conversation Shelle, between us and not talk about REPH's incredible dedication, a lot of it I credit you personally, for corporate responsibility. Tell me more about this. I have been part of the journey with you, but the audience would really benefit from hearing about how REPH pursued corporate responsibility from day one. And why is it so important to your team?

Rashelle Cejo:

Yeah. As mentioned a while ago, it all started when I had my first interview and the challenge was, what kind of CSR activity can I help build in the Philippines. That is totally different from supporting an organisation one time. That was not really the intent. The intent was aligning with expanding the help as we grow the organisation in a certain country or a certain community where we are. And it was the same challenge that I posed to our pioneer employees back then. One of our employees came up with, can we support Kapatid Kita Mahal Kita Foundation. We researched, we looked for the reasons why we need to select this community. It was near the office. It was a community. We call it Payatas. It's a big dump site in Metro Manila. The children there and their families are working and are living there at the same time. It was also about alleviating poverty through education, and continuing support and commitment to provide assistance. But what truly struck me the most, probably is the fact that the only way for us to help the kids is to get them out of there, helping their parents to work in Payatas. Get them to be scholars so that they can study and be a beacon of hope to their families. It was at that time that we also learned that the children had to stop school because of the global financial crisis. Again, this was 10 years ago. So the support for the children stopped. But we were only small at the time. So we said, we cannot support a whole lot of people. Can we start with nine scholars or 20 scholars first for the first year, depending on how much support we can get from our employees. After 10 years now, we are supporting 220 scholars, and I was informed that we have already 13 scholars with bachelor's degree holders. I can say that, with the support of our employees, they have seen the growth of the children and the scholars themselves. So they have been engaged. Every year, they have continuously helped HR and the other circles to come up with different events to keep on raising funds, so that we can continue the help and support that we provide for the kids.

YS Chi:

Yeah, so I think that the KK kids are not kids. At least the ones that you've supported initially, and you continue to bring in new ones every year. They're absolutely adorable when they show you how much your support means to them, not just in studying, but actual nutrition and safety and all that. I think they're marvellous.

Rashelle Cejo:

The company didn't stop there YS. Now we have a second site, as you know, in Iloilo. So in that community, we also have Friends of Cancer. We have the indigenous people of Panuran community. So we have expanded our support in terms of CSR, through the help of again, our resource groups, for pride and even Women Connect. So that circle of assisting, growing and extending our support is not just in Manila, but we have extended it to Iloilo as well.

YS Chi:

Yeah, I am glad to hear that lIoilo has its own local needs that you are supporting. But it goes beyond these charitable and communal engagement, right? It's all areas of corporate responsibility, inclusion, ERG's, diversity, so on.

Rashelle Cejo:

That is correct. That is correct. When you look at it, it's not just donating cash. It's about donating their time, and also their talents. So you can see that through the different efforts of our lawyers, of those graduates of nursing. They go to the community and help out one way or the other. So it's something that is an engagement activity in itself, more than a CSR activity.

YS Chi:

Right, and is this making a difference in terms of REPH being viewed uniquely against competition?

Rashelle Cejo:

Yes, definitely. That's why you will also see that we have different awards coming from the Philippine Economic Zone Authority. It's a government entity. For the past three years, they have given us the outstanding community project award. Even the Asia CEO have recognised our CSR activities. Because in other organisations, they have a pot of money. Ok, donate this to a certain organisation. But what we are doing here, it's not just donating money but it's actually coming from our employees. We have highlighted that this is actually out of the engagement and support of their employees that is somehow the most important thing to do. It's really taking them out of their work and making sure that they contribute in a different way. I think that's the reason why we're getting the recognition because they see that it is beyond just a foundation that we are supporting. There is a relationship that is built, and it is continuing.

YS Chi:

That is what we call unique contributions. Shelle, as you look toward the next 10 years, tell me a bit about your ambition for the team. It's not about just adding headcount, isn't it?

Rashelle Cejo:

Definitely. It is not just about adding headcount. It is now more about upgrading the kind of professionals or people that we hire. It's about upscaling our employees, making sure that they are ready for the next level. In fact, that is actually one of the main objectives of our next state maturity model. How do we train our current employees? How do we evolve the whole organisation to be in a mature state, with automation with process excellence. With different efficiencies in the processes that we have, so that we it is not transactional. It is more of a strategic support to our business and to our stakeholders as a whole. But at the same time, we also need to focus on the flexible work arrangement, the access to medical support online, and all of these circles and groups to help employees manage the chang. Primarily focusing on the mental health and well being of our employees, and giving due recognition to the needs of women in the workplace, to enhance inclusive and diverse culture that we have. I think all of this will really help us prepare and be ready for the future of work.

YS Chi:

I think you will be a good role model for us to learn from, as you test all these different concepts and pilots. Thank you, Shelle so much for joining me today for this podcast. And I hope that you continue to come up with most unusual innovations, and surprise all of us as you have for the last 10 years.

Rashelle Cejo:

Thank you YS, challenge accepted. Thank you.

YS Chi:

Thank you to our listeners for tuning in. Don't forget to hit subscribe on your podcast app to get new episodes as soon as they're released. Thank you so much for listening.