Since May 2023 I have been working as executive secretary and procurement at Bluevía, the new company of the Telefónica Group, and I have noticed a big cultural and personal change in the way I used to work at Telefónica de España.
Bluevía is a small company distributed in different areas: finance, operations, commercial, people, general services, purchasing, secretarial, etc. and it is very easy to interact with each other. My company is a network operator that offers wholesale FTTH access services and is owned by Telefónica Filiales, Telefónica Infra and the investment funds of Vauban and Crédit Agricole. At Bluevía we want to be the technological partner of reference that drives digital development in those municipalities and less densely populated areas, always with a policy of reducing environmental impact and CO2 footprint
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As for the way we work, because there are only a few employees, you just have to get up from your chair and talk to the person who is dealing with the issue you want to discuss, which makes bureaucracy easier, because we are all in the same room. Everything flows faster and is simpler.
If we have any doubts or queries, we solve them in a moment, and the atmosphere is very pleasant and positive, we all know each other well and there is a great spirit of collaboration, which is very noticeable at work. And we are still interacting with Telefónica de España.
My secretarial and purchasing duties
In my case, in addition to sharing secretarial tasks with my colleague Lourdes Lázaro, we manage purchasing, and we have a close relationship with this area within Telefónica de España. They are very collaborative and help us a lot with purchasing, informing us of all the related documentation and changes in regulations, among other things. They solve our doubts and are very useful for us to be able to understand our work and do it more efficiently. As far as Bluevía is concerned, every fortnight we hold a meeting with the entire finance team, so that we are all up to date with what each person is doing, we share impressions and projects, in short, we all move forward together, rowing as one.
At Bluevía we work transversally with Telefónica Infra and Telefónica España, and we have to organise a lot of meetings, so communication with them is constant and we are up to date with all organisational developments.
Working as a pool
Something I have also learned recently is how to work as a pool in my secretarial position. Lourdes and I support four people: the CEO and three other directors.
In case it can help people who work in teams or in a pool, here are some good practices that we have acquired and that are working very well for us.
Good practice
We have created from scratch a form of collaboration that is proving to be very effective thanks to the office 365 tools we have at our disposal.
To do this, we have had to learn how to handle them well and thanks to the reskilling training, available to the whole group on our Sucess Factors platform, we have made a lot of progress in the knowledge we already had. In fact, three years ago I learned so much that I became a trainer.
I love sharing new knowledge with my colleagues. I am part of the “Telefónica Community of Teachers” and there is so much talent and such great professionals within it that I learn something new every week.
Another good aspect of this position is that I have flexible working hours every week and I also telework two days a week, which allows me to organise my personal life very well and enjoy my family, sports, painting, reading, etc. Telefónica advocates work-life balance in its company policies.
My partner and I have different schedules and one tool we use on a daily basis is the One Note. There we write down all the topics in a well-structured way.
We have a specific one for purchases where we also include the contacts with whom we deal with these matters, manuals and aids, current regulations and a diary where we keep a log of all the orders we place and their current status.
At the same time, we have created another one for secretarial issues, with all our daily tasks. We write down who is in charge of each issue, how the pending issues are and we also include links to various documentation that we keep in a sharepoint shared by both of us.
In addition, we have a couple of shared Outlook mailboxes and we use the rules, we mark what is important, what is already done, what is read by each of the two and so we know if it is done, if it is read, if it is stored. Outlook has a lot of potential and you have to know how to use it.
Another good habit we have is that the documents we save in this sharepoint are filed with their nomenclatures and we write a brief description of the document in the detail, so that when we open the initial folder with all the documentation we see, at a glance, what each file includes.
We have also created chat groups with people we usually talk to, renaming the group so that it is easy to find it and if we are not in one of the two, we have saved the whole conversation and we don’t lose anything, so we don’t give rise to misinterpretations.
We have taken our first steps in power automate so that we are alerted to some important emails in teams so that we don’t leave any unanswered emails.
In short, it is a new way of working in a team and I am learning a lot from it. I love it and I’m sure I’ll be discovering a lot more.
It is also very important to have a good attitude and to promote what everyone knows how to do, valuing each person who works in the team. We all have great things to contribute.
Without a doubt, my experience in Bluevía has been a continuous learning experience that keeps me active, with enthusiasm and great ideas, and I believe that the same thing is happening to the rest of my colleagues. It is a great project that we hope will have great success in the short and long term.
