Ligia Ardelean, Atos GDC Romania: “We should actively practice empathy”

“Without any doubt, last year was an exceptional year. I believe it was by far the year with the highest number of challenges. On one hand it had a big impact, but on the other hand it had so many opportunities attached to it. If we look at the big picture, we can see the benefits not only on short term, but also on medium term,” Ligia Ardelean, Global Delivery Center Lead, Atos GDC Romania said during People Empowering Business Forum 2021 organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“Priority #1 was to make sure we care for our employees, almost 3,000 in Romania. Moving from a workspace with offices to a complete remote way of working was natural. We moved from roughly 20 percent ratio of people working from home to almost completely remote work from home for the entire organization, roughly 95 percent in Romania.

When you think of leadership in such crisis moments, you need speed of reaction, flexibility, and the ability to keep your people engaged and motivated.

Since March last year, you had to be full speed in digitalizing everything you do, meaning processes, performance, keeping up to date with what your people are doing daily.

Once you have a process in place, once you have a culture that allows you to integrate someone fresh from the outside market, I think it’s safe for you to do that as long as you keep an eye close to the people side of business, not only to speed of recruitment.

Atos Romania has been certified as great place to work location for a second time in a row, so that tells us that we must be doing something good in also this people part.

The best we can do as responsible employers is to make sure we educate and make our staff aware of the potential consequences of covid and advantages of vaccination. In order to do so, we held together with a medical company two awareness sessions of the benefits of vaccination with open Q&A session. It was a good session to get educated information, and fact-checked information that you could feed on.

My advice for us collectively is to actively practice empathy. There are times when people around us really feel the need to be taken care of even if not consciously.”

Full recording of the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NOugHtxJ4M&t=5965s