Time to lead differently — A.I and HR trends in Romania at Human Capital HR Conference
read this in Romanian here, for English see below
I like to explore different fields, put myself in other people’s shoes and see the bigger picture. I learn and explore new areas, I am constantly developing.
When Anca Ghinea, Creative Director and Owner of kreatoria.ro, consultant and manager, communication expert, expert in creativity applied to business, author, connector and trainer posted the topics she discussed at the Human Capital Conference, an HR conference organized by Capital Group, I was interested to learn more about I.A. in Romania and current trends in HR.
The conference had diverse speakers and not only in their fields of work but also in their leadership style. From analytical approaches, to business done from the heart or with a focus on meaning and community impact. There is no single recipe, no single model for doing business. We can be firm, but kind, as Andreeea Vasilescu, CEO of Premier Catering said.
Where are we with A.I in HR?
The conference was kicked off by Cosmin Tronaru, Trainer, Blockchain, NFTs & Metaverse Early Adopter at ZiXXar Technologies who introduced us to A.I. technologies in an understandable way.
He talked about the evolution of this industry, debunked myths in the media and most importantly, talked about how AI is now being applied here in HR.
It seems that AI can be helpful in HR by verifying the authenticity of the information from resumes, can suggest the right candidates in seconds from large volumes of job applications. It can recommend highly personalised courses and benefits. Another thing it can do is monitor the activity of employees and suggest improvements in real time. By using smart contracts, the beaurocracy and middle men can be eliminated.
Will AI replace us?
Jobs on the product creation side, but also some areas of services will be done entirely by A.I. in 5–7 years. One example has been customer service, where we are already seeing more and more bots, or repetitive tasks that don’t give professional or personal meaning to the employee.
How do you keep your employees?
Andreea Vasilescu, CEO of Premier Catering talked to us about managing her team in a pandemic, a time of change and uncertainty. Given the option to lay off employees or keep them, hoping they wouldn’t leave anyway afterwards, she chose the latter. She talked about the dire situation you can find yourself in when everything is uncertain and how that affects the decisions you make later.
She was asked how she managed to keep her employees in the pandemic. She said that it helped to explain that she too had gone through tough times experiencing similar challenges when launching her business, that she understands what it’s like from where they are, her being among them.
The secret to a good team is to convey the values of the team, to get them to understand and embrace the purpose. I, however, saw something else beyond the answers, and that was empathy. Empathy and getting close to people and choosing team managers who resonate with your values. We can hold on to goals without being devoid of humanity and there are x other ways of doing business and being a leader, not a boss, than the common and standard ways.
I personally consider that is obvious to many owners and CEOs why their employees are leaving, now after the pandemic. The employees want to be business partners, treated fairly, be approached in a humane way, with flexibility and without delusional, extreme targets set in the hope of a maximum pressure for maximum revenues while running the business on old patterns that worked just fine until now… To adapt to the new employees’ expectations and mindsets takes indeed a lot of energy, time, resources and money to solve. However the landscape has changed after the pandemic and old patterns are obsolete and tolerance for superficial environments drastically lowered. The Why exists, the How awaits.
A twist on evaluating performance
Iulia Zamfir, Group Human Resources Manager at One United Properties, talked to us about the paradigm shift in performance appraisal.
She reminded us that now the employees are constantly evaluating the company, not just the employer, the employees. The focus shifts to the employee. Keep your commitments to them, don’t break their trust, be transparent.
They started with evaluating the company first. That’s the novelty element. They started with themselves. In addition to other ways of evaluation, a software helped them to see the density of interactions between employees, to see who people come to for support and information, who those problem solvers are. Through surveys and one-to-one discussions, they saw how colleagues relate to each other, how they perceive each other and their level of trust in the organisation.
They do constant evaluation , with a focus on honest feedback. It is important that everyone is consulted and that their opinion, not just the employer’s, counts when decisions are made.
Sometimes they do events for no particular reason and try to provide an experience and not just a job. The old ways of operating are no longer sustainable. The new direction is to have high performing people who are happy with the employer, the job should be a place where they are valued and spend quality time.
Experience…
Oana Pascu, owner of Complice 4JOY, also focuses on experiences. It’s the very product her company sells. She said an interesting fact is that 6 months after we buy an object, we get bored of it, it loses its effect on us. Experiences make us feel more intense emotions, they transform us, they teach us, they inspire us, they activate multiple mental levels and they remain a memory — a priceless one.
Another interesting thing he said was that some companies are now starting to call their employees into the office, offering various benefits. Some companies misunderstand that only talking to your office mate is developing an organizational culture.
If we just interact with the colleague next to us, it means nothing. Valuable employees who value efficiency and don’t want to spend hours in traffic or on the road just to be present with others, those who value productivity over presence, will not be persuaded by candy or a few extra bucks on their salary, but will leave the company instead.
The key is to create experiences within the company that people want to participate in — experiences from which they grow and stay with a feeling.
No businesses will reveal their competitive advantages but they were so obvious here
Almost all speakers mentioned the importance of personal development and how it impacts business.
Employees who are open to new things, open to change, concerned about their skills, who work on them, who develop on different levels, are more valuable than we think.
I felt they were talked about with interest, even thirst. They seem to be the key to results that differentiate. And when I also think about what Cosmin Tronaru said, to the question of what to do so that AI doesn’t replace us, the answer was to touch the surface of several areas, to know the concepts, to be as knowledgeable as possible in almost everything, and then it will be easy for us to see the opportunities given by the new jobs that will emerge. So there you have it, professional, personal development.
And from there we had a short conversation about the Romanian school and the quality it offers. Technology is advancing rapidly, the needs of entrepreneurs are becoming more sophisticated and students are leaving school wondering what the Pythagorean Theorem will do for them in the job market. I personally felt there is a huge discrepancy between what 15 years of school delivers and the needs of businesses, even though the speakers tried to be positive. The solution? To develop ourselves. We have the resources online. They’re all just a search away.
I do however believe that there are about 12–15 years of education in school that would be useful to develop relevant soft and hard skills, a general culture, passion for knowledge and continuous development, and not to be basically a blocked time, time in which maybe students could… self-develop. I would have liked teachers to at least tell them what skills are needed in the job market and in life in general, and then at least have students go online to learn. I would have loved to see them instill in them a passion for knowledge and self-development. Some do, but it’s not enough.
I don’t think we can leave kids to fend for themselves. Even if we’re all on our own. On the positive side, some universities are under pressure to start teaching certain skills. Some private companies have some education programs, although they only induce skills needed for specific jobs and not a whole palette as schools might do.
On the final (for me), wow!
An energizing moment was the presentation by doctor Lorelei Nassar, DMD, MD who shared how she runs her business and concluded with an exercise on the contagiousness of our condition.
I was wow, wow, wow throughout the presentation because it’s amazing to see how she brings creativity, interdisciplinarity and meaningful action to the communities around her.
The presentation was about how to foster engagement and improve team performance. I think the secret is to give people meaning, to make them see that they can make an impact, that what they do matters. Lorelei told the story of how they worked with a clinic in Suceava, a county in Romania in a poor region. They boarded a train and teamed up to provide dental services to children in a foster home. They met up again after a while and were happy to see that the services they offered helped them.
She also told how they joined forces with neighbors, with nearby entrepreneurs at various events, from cultural events to times when they found solutions while the street where the clinic used to be was in major repairs. She brought hypnosis into stomatology, thought about how it could be applied in medicine and adapted it to the field, making her one of the few dental surgeons in the world to practice medical hypnosis.
She also talked about something that is not talked about much in Romania, but which has a big impact on our lives and business, mental health. She drew a parallel between the need for dental hygiene for healthy teeth, and the need for emotional, mental health for a healthy business.
Maybe it’s time to pay as much attention to our thoughts as we do our teeth!? We know for sure that it has an equally major and subtle impact at the same time.
Lorelei has inspired and energized us all with the way she combines creativity, open thinking, love of community, openness to people from different backgrounds, the ways in which she and her team try to bring meaning and do work that helps others; to get things done in the community, to walk with her team beyond the daily activities and thus give powerful meaning to all.
The inter-disciplinarity I observed led me to think of Anca Ghinea’s book, Creators in Action. A Guide to Creativity where she wrote that since childhood she made connections between different fields and this was part of her learning process. Creativity and meaning I think gives substance to any business.
Will you be competitive?
That was the end of the first part of the Human Capital Conference for me, the only part I could sit through, but I’m sure the string of great presentations continued into the second part. It really was a nice conclusion to what I kept reading between the lines of the presentations, between the words of the speakers — namely that what differentiates is attention to detail, empathy in dealing with your team members, open thinking, a focus on impact, on meaning, using creativity. Technology has evolved but so has the way employees relate to their workplace and as always, those who don’t adapt are out of the running.
Companies and professionals who want to succeed, to differentiate themselves, will seek to discover, experiment, integrate and use these skills and will turn to specialists, like Anca Ghinea, who work to bring results to businesses using those facets of life that are (still) ignored by the competition — effective communication, open thinking, creativity and interdisciplinarity, meaning.
Thinking broader
Speaking of interdisciplinarity, I’m glad I came to the Human Capital Conference and I think it’s just as useful from an employee perspective. I got in touch with current HR topics, felt the energy around the topics, exchanged opinions and connected with people, had aha’s, inspiration and left with pills to chew at home.
We can learn things and make valuable connections when we explore new areas. We see the bigger picture and how we can contribute in the grand scheme of things.
I hope you enjoyed it here in the chair next to me at the conference where I tried to bring you with my words. — Hi! Nice to meet you! I’m passionate about evolution, digital tools, automation, marketing, quality customer relations, administrative support and aviation with a human approach.
Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.
