Companies in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo León appear to have controlled the pandemic well compared to other parts of Latin America. The capital, Monterrey, has been resilient, even though the state exceeds 18,000 cumulative covid-19 cases. Several outsourcing providers, such as Sutherland Global, have not yet recorded a positive case.
Monterrey is a major advertising center and one of the highest industrialized centers in Latin America. Multinationals such as KIA, Toyota and Boeing are there, as well as more than 400 IT companies.
“Productivity in Monterrey is in the country and the city attracts the ability to skill due to its leading universities,” says Héctor Tijerina, director of investments in the Ministry of Economy and Labor of the Government of the State of Nuevo León.
Tijerina told Nearshore Americas that house paintings (FMH) were a viable solution for pandemic companies. “Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the OpBs in Monterrey have made the transition to home offices to protect their painters from possible exhibitions and to ensure the safe continuity of business,” Tijerina said.
The five most sensitive OOOs in the city are Teleperformance, with 4,500 employees, Atento with 3,000, Arvato with 1,700, Sitel, with 1,200 and Sutherland Global, with 800 employees. Francisco Robert, national director of Sutherland Global in Mexico, said the corporate was one of the first to leave the blocks with the WFH, taking the initiative to organize employee coverage even before the government issued regulations.
“When it all started, Mexico had only about 50 instances of Covid-19,” Robert said. “The position of Latin American governments is a little too relaxed.”
Instead of waiting, Sutherland to put in place internal measures to prevent infections.
“We seek to anticipate and make sure none of our workers would be exposed,” Robert said. “Our most sensible precedence is exactly this, to make sure we were waiting for the risks.”
For Sutherland, there was no “wait and see.” In March, the company began establishing a business continuity team, as well as a team committed to friendly workers and internal and external customers.
Communication was the key. “We tailor it to all audiences, data from official sources, by adding the Centers for Disease Control. We were collecting the troops. We were looking at what was going on in other geographic areas,” Robert said.
Five months later, Mexico amassed about 450,000 instances of Covid-19. But Sutherland didn’t hit his sites in Monterrey or Mexico City.
Twelve days before the government issued its own guidelines, Sutherland announced the WFH, an immediate transition over a three-week period. The company has presented temperature tests, fitness controls and access and exit controls at its sites.
Sutherland also organized a live social media forum, answering health questions. The corporation also tripled the cleaning facilities and staff and cancelled visits to the site from the outside.
The goal is to make sure that service disruption is not a challenge for consumers or employees. At the moment, social estrangement is less worrying, with 94% of Sutherland’s staff painting remotely.
Robert says the WFH has achieved 3 goals at once: employee fitness, providing them with task safety, and ensuring an income. “We are proud that today Sutherland in Monterrey would not want to leave anyone on leave, nor send anyone on forced vacation,” Robert said.
According to Nuevo León’s communications generation group (Csoftmty), 80% of its BPO members have controlled moving seamlessly to the WFH.
“The [others] are still running in the process,” Tijerina said. “It’s not easy to transition to a home workplace in a limited amount of time. But thanks to technology, it’s not, either,” he said.
Companies are providing online training, Tijerina said. He added that adaptation to government regulations on fitness and sanitation had not been a problem, a fact he attributes to the strong corporate culture in the region.
Meanwhile, Robert keeps in his hands how signs of fitness will remain positive for Sutherland. The company’s communication style leads to minimizing wear and tear and benefits the company’s monetary results.
“We have worked with our consumers to expand an WFH solution that uses the right generation for business sustainability,” he said. The company also solved security issues by migrating to a corporate-owned network.
The WFH won its PC’s frames and two monitors, as well as a UPS battery to prevent call interruptions. “We were looking for everyone to be sure that, in the event of a power outage, they would have at least an hour of force,” Robert said.
As a result of the changes, prices declined than expected. The company provided workers with devices previously used for training. In total, the company spent less than US$100,000 on its transformation under Covid-19 conditions, with 3 shifts and cleaning also included.
As a result of the pandemic, Sutherland has in fact noticed that his business is growing. “You’ve read [that] everyone is shrinking,” Robert said. “However, we began to see our consumers ask for more resources… We have more than 35% in two months, adding two hundred jobs. Financial functionality is in a healthy state.”
The Monterrey average is expected to exceed its profit forecast for the new monetary year by 10%, Robert said, basically because the decline has declined. “People appreciate keeping their jobs,” he added.
Amid the pandemic, absenteeism fell to 3%, part of its point before March. And the company expects its main criteria to continue with workers.
“We are trying with all the measures we have taken… to remain with zero cases,” Robert said.
Avia Ustanny-Collinder is editor-in-chief of Nearshore Americas and award-winning business journalist in St. Catherine, Jamaica.
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