A year and a half after the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic, a period marked by accelerated digitization and migration to work from home, the adoption of a hybrid work system that benefits both employees and the company is the main direction of Computer Generated Solutions (CGS) Romania, the leader of the local business process outsourcing (BPO) market, when it comes to Romanian teams.
According to a Statista study related to the expectations of Romanian employees regarding the future work system, approx. 80% expect working in the hybrid model to become a habit. In this context, CGS Romania will try to permanently adapt its approach to the work system of approx. 4,000 employees to find the most efficient options.
“Now, after more than a year of major changes and testing of new ways of doing things, we believe that the future of work means, locally and globally, flexibility and adaptation to the needs of employees. Approaching the hybrid work system within our company was a challenge because we are talking about a large number of employees and a large geographical area, with headquarters in 7 cities in the country but also with a national structure. Considering these aspects, we want to offer our employees the opportunity to apply for various working methods combining office work with remote work, when the activity allows it”, said Vladimir Sterescu, Country Manager CGS Romania.
Thus, the hybrid work system that CGS Romania will implement will be one through which employees who will work remotely will do so by rotation not for short time periods but, for practical reasons, on a longer term of at least 3-4 weeks. This also came in the context in which CGS wants to offer flexibility, but also stability to employees.
“We also have the possibility and flexibility to walk-in, if an employee tells us that they want to come to work from the office, we can easily provide them with the necessary equipment. This is now possible because we have allocated investments in the work infrastructure in the past year and we will reconfigure part of it for such situations”, Vladimir Sterescu also said.
Another important aspect of the hybrid work system addressed by CGS is the permanent adaptation of in-office support resources to employees working in the office during a certain period. Thus, CGS teams must allocate a sufficient number of dedicated support staff in both offices and remote systems. Another challenge is given by the flexibility in rotating management tasks. Basically, the management team provides feedback to in-office people, whether they are part of their team or not, while remote team leaders supervise people at work from home, precisely to maximize support, leading to volume flexibility.
“The rotating work system offers the same experience to colleagues no matter where they work in terms of technology and tools they have access to. Thus, now the technical support is 24/7 and it’s being accessible to any employee. This will lead to greater employee autonomy. In fact, any of our employees can work from anywhere, even from areas far from the cities where we have offices, as long as they have access to the Internet”, stressed the company’s representative.
The new hybrid work model also brings with it new ways of monitoring employees and their productivity, as well as the connection between team leaders and the teams they coordinate as well as the propagation of company values among new employees. However, the opportunity to work in turn from the office and from home is an incentive especially for new employees who, if they prove that they have successfully gone through the assimilation process, can work remotely.
“The most important aspect when it comes to the adoption of the hybrid system in the case of CGS was the healthy infrastructure and the internal regulation oriented towards this working model. Infrastructure means not only tools, but also mindset. The people in the company understood that it is a benefit and our management teams were always open to discuss the changes implemented. In Romania, a solid culture of working from home is beginning to emerge, and this is gradually becoming a normality and it is important to have, from the very beginning, all the necessary skills to approach it correctly”, Sterescu added.
He concluded by adding that hybrid work can be productive when the employer and employees set, from the very beginning, the type of activities that can be undertaken from home or from office.
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