Diana Misa, OTP Bank Romania: “Employee wellbeing is one of our strategic objectives”

“You need to have the proper structure in place to build a company culture. I don’t think you will find in many HR teams an area of activity that combines customer experience and employee experience.

You cannot have satisfied customers until you have satisfied employees. This starts with HR. It’s very unusual to have customer experience in HR, but our company decided to give it a shot. Three years after that moment, I can tell you it was a great idea to implement,” Diana Misa, HR Executive Director, OTP Bank Romania said during People Empowering Business Forum organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“If you really want to build a customer-centric culture, if you want your people to be skilled, trained, aware about customer needs and how to address customer needs, this could start with recruitment, with onboarding, with training.

Of course, we need to have support from leaders, from top managers. One of the five strategic objectives of our bank in the last two years relates to employee wellbeing and we measure this in annual engagement surveys.

The most important work we do is done together with the board, with people managers and we look at processes at both ends: what we can do to build/ to grow and what we don’t tolerate, because it’s important to also establish boundaries. Toxic behaviours, harassment or bullying are not acceptable. We have a legal framework to address this properly, but we don’t tolerate this. We are very serious about this; we had some decisions to terminate work relationships in those cases.

As an employer, or shareholder, or people manager, I don’t want my people to be tired, to be burned out. Their contribution should be delivered in the best possible conditions for them. If they are tired, if they are too stressed, if they feel the work environment is unfair sometimes, I will not personally prefer to work with a team that feels like that. I would suggest the employers to find ways to organize work in such a flexible way that people have more freedom, because this freedom pays back in loyalty, in considering that their interests and personal dreams could be fulfilled in that company.

Team gets you further then we can do it by ourselves. In my view, team should be a support system for each of us. The employers must do the hard job and think of how to provide this kind of workplace and culture that brings the best in people and gives them energy.”

Full recording of the conference: