Jean-Pierre ALLEN, Managing Director at Total Global Services Bucharest since September 2020
- What was the most challenging thing your company, people, and you, personally, had to face in 2020?
If I must retain only one thing it’s obviously the work from home changes we had to cope with. Even myself when in September I had to start my new appointment as a Managing Director in Bucharest, in a new company, in a new country with mainly new “virtual” teams 😊. It was, and still be, adaptation and innovation.
- What pleasantly surprised you last year? / What are you grateful for?
First, I was really pleased to discovered Romania and more precisely the Romanian people and culture.
Second, the fact that work from home is something possible and mainly the fact that generates 0 impact on our services for our clients. Even so our clients didn’t notice the first time when we switched on working remotely. We still need now to adapt ourselves and our organization to this new reality, to maintain the team spirit, cohesion and innovation.
- What are your plans and expectations for 2021?
I have 2 major expectations:
- The first one is to come back to normal life by mid-year, having this sanatory crisis behind us.
- The second one is to not face a huge economic crisis after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Regarding the plans that come with my role, the first thing will be to maintain our agility and our capability to adapt ourselves to what will happen in 2021 as I’m sure we will face a lot of uncertainty.
This uncertainty will affect our colleagues, our teams and our clients. So we will need, from my personal point of view, to focus on reducing the “social distance” or better say the “physical distance”, and reinforce the proximity and agility – internally, with the sustainability of the work from home practices but also with our international customers and stakeholders that we won’t meet anymore on a physical and regular basis.
In addition, our plan is to improve and develop our services for our customers and to provide additional added value to our customers with, for example, data analytics/data mining to advise businesses. For sure we will have to continue to increase our efficiency and focus on cost.
- What do you foresee it will be different this year and what impact it will have on our industry/Romania/your company/your people?
To my point of view, there will be no real difference this year compared to the previous year – at least until mid-year.
Digital transformation and innovation are currently a hot topic for all businesses. What we see making the difference in the current context, are the skills of reducing the “social distance” by keeping the “physical distance” as our most important value has always been Safety First. We already work in a highly technological context – now we need to use these skills to transform and adapt what is our engagement, understand the big picture and see multiple opportunities throughout this entire pandemic, together.
And it is not a minor thing that the vaccine is bringing lots of hopes to everyone and to the economy.
- What is your message for the ABSL community?
To onboard me 😊 as I am new here and I have very good comments from my team regarding the ABSL community. Looking forward to interacting with you in real life events this year.
- What could we do to grow stronger as a community?/ A message for ABSL or a suggestion.
To be honest, right now, as I am new in Romania and this is my first interaction with the ABSL community, I don’t know. I hope next year I will be able to provide more valuable answers 😊