Interview: Angelina Arulraj on Career Growth and Company Culture at HemoCue

Interview with Angelina Arulraj on Career Growth and Company Culture at HemoCue

As a quality system specialist, Angelina Arulraj spends her days making HemoCue products and processes better—and at the same time, she’s growing her own career. Below, Angelina explains the global path that led her to join the team, how her colleagues have supported her on a years-long journey of learning, and how she’s preparing for what comes next. 

What’s your role on the team?

I work mainly with audits and corrective and preventative actions (CAPAs). It’s my responsibility to collate and analyze data on different key performance indicators—from production yield to the time it takes to close complaints to internal training processes, and even our audits themselves—and present it to management. We then use this data to determine whether any improvement actions or CAPAs need to be initiated. If we do initiate a CAPA, I might own that project myself, but usually, I’m training associates who are subject matter experts to be the CAPA owners and then supporting them throughout that journey. I’ll give them guidance on using Danaher Business System (DBS) tools like Root Cause Investigation or Problem Solving Process, help them keep up with whatever timeline we’ve set, and make sure the actions we implement actually address the issue. 

On the audit side, I work with internal and external audits. I’m responsible for proposing our internal audit programs to HemoCue’s leadership, and I complete some of those audits myself. Then when we have an external audit—if the FDA comes, for example—I help make sure the organization is prepared for that, and I’ll work as a liaison between the front and back office so the auditor has what they need.

What led you to HemoCue?

My background is in biomedical sciences—I did my master’s in health care and business administration in the U.S. After that I went back to Singapore, where I grew up, and worked in a similar role to this one, doing data management and quality improvement, but for a hospital. That led me to health services research for the National University of Singapore. Then my husband got a job in Sweden, so I relocated. I was still working for the university at first, but I was keeping my eye out for something local, too, and happened to come across HemoCue at a job fair. They had a temporary opening for a maternity cover in regulatory affairs (RA), working on vigilance and incident reporting, and I’d had some experience with incident investigations at the hospital—although I’d never really worked in RA or the medical device field. But it looked interesting. Of course, in a hospital role, if you discover a device has malfunctioned, that’s the end of your investigation. This was going beyond that, to the true root cause.

I knew it would be a big shift culturally—it was a very different work environment from what I’d been used to in Singapore. But my manager gave me a lot of guidance and made it easy to jump in and learn, and it’s been a great place to work. 

Tell us more about that adjustment. What’s the company culture like?

I think what’s stuck out to me most is the level of responsibility you’re given and how easy it is to effect change, even if you’re relatively new. I’d just graduated from my master’s two years earlier when I joined the team, so I didn’t have a lot of experience. In some of the jobs I’d had previously, you ran everything through someone else—or a few people—before it reached the auditor or the head of the company. You might prepare the information, but then your manager presents it. This was the opposite; within four months, my manager suggested I do the vigilance portion of our presentation at an audit. I was surprised and asked, “Are you sure?” But she said, “You worked on it, so why not?” It was a nice feeling that she trusted me that much.

Something else I’ve noticed about the culture is it’s very collaborative. I depend a lot on the rest of the organization in my role—I probably spend more time working with people outside my team than I do with people on it! And I think we’re lucky at HemoCue because I’m never treated like the police officer because I work in Quality.  On the contrary, everyone is involved with compliance and quality and actually believes it’s important. 

Tell us about your career path since joining the team.

When I first started, I was adapting our Vigilance process for the Medical Device Single Audit Program, which was a new program at the time. There were only four of us in the team then, and we were all relatively new, so there was a lot of figuring things out on the fly. I loved it—it was such an exciting time. From there, I took another position as a sub-project manager for vigilance and conformity assessment for the In Vitro Diagnostic Regulation (IVDR) transition project. IVDR, a new EU regulation, is quite a step up from the previous standard, and we had to move quickly; HemoCue had just a few years to get certified in order to keep selling products in the EU. That was another exciting project, and we ended up being one of the first Danaher operating companies to earn our IVDR QMS certification.

Around the time that wrapped up, this role opened, and because they knew I liked working on audits, my manager suggested it might be interesting for me. That’s one of the things I really like about HemoCue—you’re not the only person thinking about your career growth. Everyone is! In development meetings and one-on-ones with your manager, they’re always asking about what you like to do, and hiring and retaining talent is a strategic goal for our leaders. It feels like your development is important to the company as a whole, and people are always looking out for what your next step might be. 

What has HemoCue done to support that growth?

We talk a lot within Danaher about the 70-20-10 development model—70% of learning comes from assignments, 20% comes from mentorship, and 10% comes from training. I really like that, because it gives you room to grow but you still have enough support to not feel overwhelmed. Of course, in a compliance position, I’m required to have specific qualifications, and formal training is definitely still important. But you can’t learn how something actually works without actually doing it and having someone to talk it through with. When I’m learning something new, I get the time and opportunity to try it on my own, rather than having someone checking on my progress at every step, which I think would just be stressful. But if I do get stuck, I have lots of support—and not just from my manager, but my other colleagues, too. That’s so important, having people to help me think something through. You might think that in a compliance role, things are black and white and it’s always clear what to do. But sometimes there are multiple ways to solve a problem. So you need that mentorship and coaching to figure out the best path.

What’s hard about your job?

One thing that I think is always challenging in a quality role is striking the right balance. We have to make sure that the quality system is compliant while also ensuring that it is easy to work with and practical.

Another challenge over the past couple of years has been adjusting to working from home. When I started here, pre-pandemic, if I ran into an issue that didn’t make sense to me, I could just walk over to someone’s office and ask for help. That’s different when you’re not in the same physical location. But we’ve done a lot of things to make those collaborations easier—we have daily coffee breaks where you can chat with anyone, and of course, we have one-on-one meetings with our managers every week. It does take that first step of messaging or calling someone and asking if they have a minute to talk, but after that, it’s just as easy to get some guidance. 

What are you looking forward to?

I do see myself as a people leader at some point—that’s what I’m working toward in my development goals, and my manager and I talk about how to get there, whether here at HemoCue or somewhere else in Danaher. I hadn’t really considered that possibility much before I joined this company, but my first manager got me thinking about it early on. She asked if I wanted to focus more on building my expertise in the work itself, or add leadership training, as well. At the time, I was surprised. I hadn’t been doing this long, and I didn’t think I was ready for that. But she explained it wasn’t about making a change overnight; it’s just that management is its own specialized skill set, so if it’s something you want to do, you need to have the relevant training.

I thought more about what’s exciting to me, and as I learned more about my role and people started asking me questions, I realized how much I liked those discussions. I really enjoy making suggestions and coaching. So eventually, I decided I did want to pursue a leadership role, and I’ve been lucky enough to participate in training like our Emerging Female Managers Program and learn some DBS tools like Situational Leadership. Now I feel like when the right opportunity comes up, I’ll be ready.