When Michael was in his twenties and a professional tennis coach, he saw an opportunity he’d dreamt about as a child playing on his Commodore 64. After pursuing his goal and studying business informatics, he realised that he could embark on a career that would make a difference: by using technology to improve people’s lives.
Twenty years later, at the age of 47, he’s a Human Resources (HR) business technology specialist at Julius Baer. As such, he’s one of a team that makes life easier for the Bank’s HR department specifically and 6,700 employees around the world more generally. The team achieves this by continually integrating and improving the HR technology systems.
With Julius Baer driving forward a digital transformation, Michael and his colleagues have an important part to play. Though overshadowed by the more obvious task of applying technology to create a silky-smooth client experience more in line with what the younger generation has come to expect in an era of e-commerce, the HR business technology team is quietly working to do the same for employees and future employees.
Enhancing the employee experience
Most notably, they introduced Julius Baer’s HR platform called HR Connect in 2017, replacing an old legacy platform. “With this new user experience, we are now able to provide more personalised content and timely and relevant information directly on the landing page,” Michael explains. “In addition, we introduced two new dashboards: ‘My Personal Information’ and ‘My Job & Career’. These dashboards centralise helpful reports and tasks for all employees and managers. Our most recent enhancement was the launch of the digital childcare allowance request for our Switzerland-based colleagues, a fully paperless process, which cuts down a lot of work our HR colleagues previously had to do.”
Using technology to improve people’s lives in this way appeals to the meticulous. Sonja, 42, is a Finn who came to Switzerland 10 years ago as a global learning specialist. Also an HR business technology specialist, she jokingly describes herself as a Lego enthusiast who has to limit herself to building new models only over the Christmas break. That said, she keeps a Lego flower bouquet on her desk instead of fresh flowers.
Sonja’s specific role is as the technical lead for the learning module within HR Connect. As such, she keeps the learning module up to date, makes sure the right people get sent the right courses and fields any technical inquiries.
Using a fast-food metaphor, she modestly describes her job in the following way: “We recently had a new joiner in our team and I explained to him that I’m like an Uber driver for pizza. So, the course is the pizza. I get told where the pizza needs to go, but I will never open the box – this is managed by the JB Academy.”
Always learning
Having originally worked at Julius Baer from 2014 to 2016, Sonja rejoined in 2020 – a decision she describes “like coming back home.” She enthuses about the team spirit: in the week of the interview for this article, she was looking forward to a team bake-off which she didn’t expect to win (and ultimately did), never having baked a cake before. What’s more, she values the flexibility of work life: as a morning person, the Bank lets her start early and finish early.
For his part, Michael also appreciates the firm’s ‘Flexible Work Model’. He might want to work either early or late in the evening, and he takes advantage of the option to work from home two days a week.
He has also had some proud moments since joining 10 years ago in 2012: “My proudest moment was probably the go-live of HR Connect back in 2017,” he recalls. “We did the whole transformation and migration in just over a year: it was really tough, but it was great. I still remember that call we had at night when we went live, and we were sharing our screens and it was amazing.”
Asked what advice they might give to anyone thinking of joining Julius Baer’s diverse HR business technology team of 10 composed of seven different nationalities, Michael and Sonja have similar thoughts: it’s not so much the specialist tech skills they seek; more the willingness to learn and problem solve, as well as a good team spirit and being passionate.
After all, they’re both still learning. Since joining Julius Baer, Michael has swapped tennis for golf and plays off a handicap of five. Meanwhile, Sonja is eager to tackle new problems, including baking more cakes.