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Meet & Greet: Gianluca Ena, Chief Commercial Operations Director at Hearst UK

Interviews

Diversity and inclusion LGBTQ+ professional

In this week’s Meet & Greet interview, myGwork member & Hearst UK’s Chief Commercial Operations Director Gianluca Ena shares the importance of LGBTQ+ inclusion in the workplace, and maintaining a work-life balance given the rise in home and hybrid working arrangements. He also provides a glimpse into how he balances his work life with family and personal commitments.

 

myGwork: Can you tell us a bit about your career journey to date? 

 

Gianluca: I moved to the UK right after graduating from the University of Bologna. My objective was to study English for a few months and go back to Italy, but life had other plans for me and I’m still here after 18 years. I fell in love with the UK modus operandi and its meritocracy rather quickly. Particularly, I was blown away by how relatively easier everything was, compared to back home, if one had ambition and intentions to work hard. I worked in hospitality to fund my post-graduate in advertising, moved to NYC for work experience and came back to London to start my very first job in advertising at AOL as a trafficker. In 2008, I joined the Facebook European Landing Team in its early days when it was only 10 of us in a room in Soho Square, worked there for many years, moved to Twitter UK to head up a bigger team and then joined Hearst in 2017.

myGwork: What's the most challenging aspect of managing people right now? 

Gianluca: Spending less time face-to-face has its challenges when managing large teams. Building a team culture remotely can be tricky, especially for new starters who might not get to experience the full spectrum of working in media. Advertising is fuelled by ideas, creativity and nuances in personalities that I find are at their best when in a room together. Working remotely can drive a lot of efficiencies in that answers to questions or responses to tasks can be delivered quickly and efficiently, but what’s often missing is new questions. Spontaneous and organic face-to-face catch-ups lead to new ideas that are shared organically with people that might not be naturally included in a planned 30 minutes Teams call, and this contributes to opening possibilities that are often totally new.

 

myGwork: What attributes do you look for in new recruits and why? 

Gianluca: What I look for is pride in what one does. Taking a job seriously means a lot to me, no matter what the job or the seniority is and, although I often hear ‘we are not saving lives’, I find that the team members that are dedicated to their role and take real pride in what they do are also the ones that build team culture, focus much more on diversity and equality, and ultimately drive the business forward at all levels.

myGwork: How important is LGBTQ+ inclusion in the workplace for you personally? 

Gianluca: Extremely important of course. I’ve been very lucky in my career so far and never felt that my sexual orientation got in the way of my roles. At Hearst UK we have a very welcoming culture and are laser focused on making it even better. I do see that sometimes the expectations of our community are very focused on quick outcomes, which lead to frustrations if not delivered immediately. If I think about the way I came out to myself for example, it was certainly a process and although I did expect my parents and friends to embrace it straightaway once I was ready to do it, I had to remind myself that I didn’t and that it was, and it is, key to take all parties on a journey with us.

myGwork: What's your favorite inclusion campaign to date and why? 

Gianluca: More than a campaign, what has been really refreshing recently is the online catalogues of clothes and how there is much more focus on diversity and inclusion. I feel that this is much more natural of an effort than some campaigns that do try really hard. I find some marketing efforts too focused on ticking a box rather than driving real change, especially in Pride month.  

myGwork: How do you encourage staff to have a work-life balance, especially with the increase in remote/hybrid working? 

Gianluca: We have a really good hybrid working policy at Hearst UK, and these structures are needed in large organisations (as an Ops person, of course I’d say that). My Leadership Team and I are very understanding, and personal needs and nuances are managed at a local level providing even more flexibility to our teams. Trust is even more important than ever in this hybrid working environment and mutual respect is at the core.

myGwork: What's the biggest highlight of your career to date and why? 

Gianluca: There are many things that I am very proud of. The biggest though is that I’ve continued to try really hard to treat people the way I want to be treated. I know it has not always been possible, but I hope to at least have a very strong rationale as to why I haven’t. Hierarchy is certainly needed in corporations, but behind every box with a name in an Org chart, there’s a person with their personal situations and shades that are unique to all of us. Having experienced different scenarios in my career and life to date, I strive to be respectful of individual paths. One size might fit 75% of any given audience, but certainly not all. 

myGwork: What was the last book you read? Any interesting take-aways and would you recommend it to fellow leaders? 

Gianluca: Existential Kink. I wanted to read a different perspective to the whole The Secret wave which fascinated me years ago and it was recommended by a friend. I guess the main takeaway is that we can do a lot for ourselves, not just focusing on positivity, but understanding our negativity better. I mean this is really just a very simplified version of my understanding of it…

myGwork: What was your last holiday destination and where do you plan to visit next? 

Gianluca: I went to Israel and I’m off to Sardinia next! It’s where I’m from and in recent years I’m trying to spend as much time as I can with my family after years of prioritising seeing the world. I’ve avoided it for decades, even when I was a student I preferred to melt in Bologna in the summer rather than going home. What was wrong with me?

myGwork: What do you do to unwind at the end of a hard day? 

Gianluca: ‘Mens sana in corpore sano’ (‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’) is what my Latin professors used to say all the time when I was in High School, and I only appreciated this later in life when my schedules started to be really busy between work, family and personal life. During the first lockdown, I started to follow a healthy regime through an app that links together several other apps, which my personal trainer monitors daily and religiously. Ten years ago, I would have answered this question with ‘drinks in Soho with my colleagues’. Today, I say exercise and good food. I am still fun, I promise. I just enjoy being fresh and energetic during the week. 

 

 You can find more about Gianluca and connect with him here.

 

Check out some of myGwork's other recent Meet & Greet interviews, including:

 


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