Raluca Dolan, Cognizant Softvision: “What keeps our employees engaged is flexibility”

“In Cognizant Softvision we are structured on communities. We even have an HR community. We are not calling it the HR team. It’s more than a team. It’s somewhere we belong. Within the community we have all the layers of seniority. When it comes to growing it’s an instinct on having the new ones taken care of by the others. People in the IT world are passionate about learning, so we don’t have to put an extra-effort in convincing them to do courses to enhance their career. They are extremely demanding and always want to be updated,” Raluca Dolan, HR Director, Cognizant Softvision said during People Empowering Business Forum organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“We always must think ahead. We always must train our people to project their future in 6 to 18 months. We need the little visioners that are going to see the coming days and to be ready when the technical solutions will appear. We are doing this by creating opportunities for our employees.

Learning, growing, and having the culture of keeping up with everything that is new is a matter of how the society invests and encourages these things.

The office becomes that cosy place to socialize. It’s not so much about working anymore in the office but getting there to meet your colleagues. What keeps our employees engaged is flexibility, the possibility to choose. They can choose where to work, when to work. Up to which level of flexibility are we heading to? I don’t know, but I’m sure that this is the future: optionality and flexibility.

We are stepping into the world of diversity because we have new cultures coming in. We are welcoming those who we appreciate but are we the same when dealing with different cultures that we don’t know so well. When working with different cultures that are so different to ours, are we ready to welcome them? Cognizant means a lot of nationalities. There are 330,000 people, a lot of nationalities.”

Full recording of the conference: