Rookies’ route to routine

Published on 01/07/2021

Hélène Bruzual-Alfonzo was reluctant to talk about her role as the only woman on the STEIH remediation team. She was right. Her gender, as I found out after we sat together for a 30-minute talk, had nothing to do with her experience on the ground.

“After my studies, I was glad to land a job with ERM,” Bruzual-Alfonzo said. “I had worked in Brussels for a while after my studies in environmental engineering, but this was my first real assignment.”

She still remembers her first day at the STEIH remediation site – but almost as if through a haze. “I was absolutely overwhelmed,” she recalls. “There were some 80 people on the site, a full-running team in which everyone knew what to expect from the other. It was hard for me to find a place to fit, also because the people on the remediation site mostly spoke German.”

Originally from France, Bruzual-Alfonzo had a steep learning curve ahead of her. Not only did she have to consolidate her German language skills and into practice the theoretical knowledge she had gained from her environmental sciences studies, she also had to fit into a neatly run team that seemed to have neither time nor patience to look after a rookie.

“The fact that I was the only woman on the team was just one tiny element that formed my initial experience,” Bruzual-Alfonzo said. “There were other as-pects that were much more important.”

In many ways, her early days on the STEIH remediation project were not much different from the experience of her colleague Stefan Brendel, who had joined ERM during his studies at around the same time. “I was on and off on the remediation site at the beginning, but I, too, struggled as a novice in the team.”

One key hurdle for Brendel and Bruzual-Alfonzo was that other team members initially did not fully integrate the two remediation experts into the planning and were reluctant to share their knowledge right away both for lack of time and to keep them at a distance as freshmen. “This was really the biggest stumbling block. We felt somewhat isolated and couldn’t immediately join in the team and grow with it.”

However, this changed rapidly with the arrival of ERM’s Klemens Mueller on the site. The experienced engineer quickly realized that both Brendel and Bruzual-Alfonzo needed to participate in all crucial meetings and carry their share of responsibility to become fully fledged team members and win the respect of the others.

“We learned a lot thanks to Klemens,” Brendel recalls. “He had patience with us and lent us an ear whenever we ran into difficulties. Nevertheless, he would mostly let us do our job and only intervene if required. He would also crack a joke once in a while to help ease tension. All of this helped us grow in a relatively short period.”

Over time, both Brendel and Bruzual-Alfonzo transformed into fully fledged experts, leaving their rookie days behind them after a few months under the stewardship of Mueller. “For us, the real breakthrough came when team members stopped looking at us as mere beginners but experts in our own right,” Brendel said, adding that “this helped us not only feel better but really grow as professionals and individuals.”

This sense of belonging was paramount. “Being integrated is not just about being part of a group but also being allowed to speak up and reach your full potential,” said Bruzual-Alfonzo. “This has nothing to do with being a woman or a man, it’s about a general appreciation of a person in his and her own right. That’s all that counts at the end of the day.”

At the final ceremony in October 2019, when all players came together, both Brendel and Bruzual-Alfonzo mingled with the rest of the group, joking with their colleagues from ERM as well as their friends from Novartis, Züblin and Marti. Their rookie days were long gone and they could look back on a great success – which they had helped to achieve!