Raquel Crystal is Head of Human Resources & Operations at Sio Gene Therapies (f/k/a Axovant Gene Therapies).
Ms. Crystal has 15 years of human resources experience across different industries. She previously served as Head of Human Resources and Talent Acquisition at Roivant Sciences, Inc.
Prior to that, Ms. Crystal was the Head of Human Resources for CoreOne Technologies, LLC, a financial technology firm, covering Europe, Asia and North America. She also held multiple roles in human resources at Morgan Stanley and Ambrose Employer Group, LLC. She holds a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University.
More from Raquel…
Burnout is real. Raquel’s organization makes sure that it is upfront about how important it is to take time for yourself to be able to do your best work. She explains how a company can be flexible with their employee’s time.
“It’s very easy to get caught up in your work. So we have talked about it and I think what’s important is letting everyone know that just because we’re going through a time, now, where we’re all working from home doesn’t mean that you’re still not entitled to your time off. It doesn’t mean you’re still not entitled to your vacation time.
But something that we do at Axovant– so we actually have a flexible time off policy, or in other words, we don’t have a vacation policy. We don’t track time off. Employees can really take as much time as they need to recover, to spend time with their family, etc. As long as your work is being done. So, the idea is it doesn’t matter when, where, what, why, as long as you’re getting your work done. And again, this kind of goes back to making sure you’re recruiting the right talent. We really want people to feel that they have that autonomy to really feel empowered, feel like they are the CEOs of their own career, so to speak.
So, with that said, we tell people we understand we have employees who, you know, both parents are now working from home while they’re dealing with homeschooling their children. There are times when you’re on the phone and there’s a kid that walks up behind an employee and starts asking for something or crying and you have to be flexible. You have to be understanding. Then, if you need to take an hour off to deal with childcare or simply take time off to walk away from your computer or go for a run. That’s okay.
Every time our CEO takes vacation, we have an email the entire company to notify them that he’s going to be on vacation and that he normally comes back from vacation and during our next town hall talks about his vacation. This gives employees the idea that it’s okay to take vacation time. In fact, our CEO took off about a week at the end of May around Memorial Day weekend. He let everybody know that he’s going to be taking some family time. So again, it’s top down. Having the employees see that members of the executive management team are still taking time off. And it’s okay. I think allows employees to feel more comfortable saying to their manager, I’ve really been working a lot this week, I really just need a day or two off next week. And that’s okay.”
