Copyright thediplomat
We’re also facing the challenge of bringing colleagues back to the office. We see this happening across many companies. It’s a trend that is growing more and more. After the pandemic, when most companies or most employees worked from home, there is now increasing pressure from management teams. The issue is that especially younger colleagues and employees are reluctant to return to the office. This happens in almost every industry, particularly within companies with hundreds or thousands of employees. Caught in the middle are usually people partners and HR professionals. In our discussions with them, we try to find ways to remove this friction. Because Company X, which wants to bring employees back to the office at least 3-4 days per week, needs to offer additional benefits to simplify their experience. We’re talking about 2-3 extra hours that any employee has to allocate every day. So, one solution some companies are adopting is, for example, to allocate vouchers to offer employees 200 lei. A coupon they can use to commute from home to the office and back. This is one of the main trends we are seeing, at least in terms of mobility. There are AI tools that can help during job interviews, for example. Such a tool can participate in the meeting and extract key points, allowing us to focus 100% on the conversation, without having to take live notes and risk missing important details. I believe this is good practice and I truly encourage using tools in ways that simplify our daily work. We live in capitalism, that’s the reality, and we must give valuable people our time, our energy, and the resources they need, and from a leadership perspective, we must be supportive — but supportive in a way that creates the context for them to grow. I believe it is important for leaders in organizations to create an environment that enables their teams to perform. To communicate clearly and transparently, and I believe that in the period ahead, resilience will play a very, very important role.
