Tailoring Mobility Needs to Organizational Culture
Susan R. Ginsberg & David Welch - Mar 03 2022Resilience is rooted in an open and adaptive mindset
Bob Church, Jr., Senior Manager, Global Mobility at Tronox, successfully navigated the challenges of moving essential employees to distant facilities by embracing the unique culture and workforce at Tronox.
Many of the company’s 6,500 employees across six continents are essential workers, who are required to be on-site in remote rural locations every day. Tronox acted quickly, confronting the pandemic in 2020 by implementing practices such as social distancing, masks, remote working, staggered shifts, temperature screening checkpoints, and enhanced sanitization and disinfecting procedures.
While Tronox was able to greatly restrict employee travel, ongoing operations to mine and process titanium ore, zircon, and other materials and manufacture titanium dioxide products required the company to relocate talent as soon as it proved feasible. In this complex and volatile recovery, Bob ensured that the mobility program was responsive to changes in infection rates and protocols in all the countries in which the company operates.
Bob continuously updated Tronox's assignees and their senior managers as travel regulations, quarantines, and visa availability changed in countries of arrival and departure. In one instance, Tronox had a small team from South Africa that resumed rotational travel to Saudi Arabia. Bob worked with them non-stop, identifying potential options to get them to their projects.
Because Tronox employees are expected to find ways to reduce risk while getting the job done, the South Africa team did not need Bob to manage every aspect of their rotational travel. What they did need—and Bob delivered—was extensive mobility support with technical issues, including visas, travel restrictions, and tax & payroll reporting. As the mobility manager, Bob embraced that challenge and understood what the traveling employees required.
To navigate the myriad COVID and immigration rules, the group first traveled from South Africa to a separate country to serve out the mandatory 14-day quarantine. As they traveled, the team moved through countries where Tronox had no operating presence, and Bob could only provide limited support. The employees had to be resilient and deal with numerous challenges, such as airline check-in & cancellations, constantly changing travel restrictions, lack of available of quarantine housing and “normal” risks associated with working in a war zone.
Reflecting on staff performance throughout COVID, Dylan Audeyev, VP, Global Safety, Health, Environment, and Quality wrote, “The teams embraced our core value of being adaptable, decisive and effective. This experience we have been through has transformed us, making us more resilient for the next challenge or problem we face, knowing that when we come together, we will be successful.”
Join the conversation on resilience in the March 16 Worldwide ERC® webinar Resilience: The Art of Recovering from Setbacks, with hosts Susan R. Ginsberg and David Welch and panelists Becky Woods, GPHR, SHRM-SCP, Elena Anderson GMS-T, GPHR, SHRM-SCP, and Bob Church, Jr.