Tudor Petecila, HR Director, Teleperformance Romania
- Tell us a few words about your company, services provided and type of roles you accommodate.
Teleperformance Romania is a member of the Teleperformance Group, the global leader in customer experience management, a group with more than 380k employees serving over 170 countries worldwide. In Romania we are 1300 employees (and growing) and our main expertise is in the areas of call center, business process automation (BPO) and outsourcing. The Teleperformance DNA is what makes each interaction simpler, faster, better, safer, more cost-effective by combining high-tech and high touch with Lean Six Sigma discipline.
- What makes your company a great place to work for?
For our company the previous year and a half meant a transformation journey with new members in the executive team, with growth for existing clients and new logos in our portfolio, all of these in a pandemic period that challenged everyone. Considering this, we are now very proud to announce that we have just received the Great Place to Work certification after a very elaborate process and audit conducted by the Great Place to Work Institute. The main attributes that were recognized by our employees in the dedicated survey were diversity and inclusion, communication, team spirit and leadership behaviors. For us this is both a recognition of our efforts as well as a commitment that we will keep our focus in making our employees’ lives and experience better every day.
- Give us more details about the company’s culture and working vibe/atmosphere.
Teleperformance Romania’s team is a truly diverse one, our unique focus on people is part of Teleperformance’s DNA and we believe in a simple solution to achieve our goals: happy employees make happy customers. We have colleagues from over 30 nationalities, with diverse backgrounds and experiences and everybody feels welcomed, as we do our best to encourage, support and cherish everyone’s contribution. Of course, working in the customer experience area could be challenging sometimes and requires dedication, specific skills, attention, patience, and energy. Interacting with people is not always an easy task, but at the end of the day, when you manage to overcome the challenges and see the results of your efforts and the appreciation of the clients, it can all be very rewarding.
- Do you ensure career paths to your employees?
I believe that a job in the customer experience area has a limited life span (of course, this might vary considering the domain, type of customer interaction and the brand you are serving) and it is very important for companies from the call center / BPO / outsourcing industries to invest in their people development and create real opportunities for career advancement. At Teleperformance Romania we open all the career opportunities internally first and all the eligible employees (according to each job’ requirements) can apply and participate in a very clear and transparent selection process. At the same time, we want to offer full visibility to each employee on how they might progress within the company: which are the potential job roles and the minimum requirements for each one of them. Moreover, we have built internal initiatives such as “A day in my shoes”, if you want to find out more about a certain job, or an advanced internship framework called “Jump!” to identify and prepare successors for key roles.
- What trainings do you offer?
Year 2020 completely changed the game in the training industry, and I like to believe that we managed to accommodate to the online environment in a timely manner: we have quickly digitalized all the new joiners training and implemented a dedicated learning platform for all employees aiming at continuous learning. Currently, our learning experiences are exclusively online (both self-paced and led by a trainer) and we focus on the following learning areas: coping with working from home, emotional and mental health, communicating with empathy, business intelligence, Lean Six Sigma, and leadership. The curriculum is a dynamic one and we are updating it regularly using our training needs investigation and analysis process.
- You know how dynamic our industry is – so what is your strategy to keep your employees engaged, motivated and boost their creativity so they can innovate?
In a very dynamic industry as ours and especially in a pandemic period, employee engagement and motivation are not an easy fix and requires constant focus and attention. For us the first step was to know at any given point how our employees are feeling, so we wanted to build a tool to measure our employee engagement in real time. Therefore, in collaboration with our colleagues from Greece, Turkey, Colombia and the United Stated we have created the “Emoji and Sentiment Survey” a tool in which, once per day, any employee could share their feelings by selecting an emoji and by clicking on the reason from a pre-defined list. All the data are being aggregated in a Power BI tool so the project team could analyze at any given point the results by project department, manager etc. The information collected by this tool helped us to customize and prioritize our actions around employees’ feedback: we have organized emotional and mental health webinars, online sport competitions, online events triggering cultural diversity and many others. In the financial part, we benefit from the new fiscal code and offer to all employees a teleworking bonus to cover some of the potential expenses associated with the working from home environment – our effort was appreciated, and we received very positive reactions from our employees and from the candidates.
- We are all unique, so how do you succeed to answer to different needs that your employees might have?
In my perspective, for being able to respond to different needs and expectations, you need 2 things: to create as many frameworks as you can for hearing the voice of the employees and to build and prioritize your actions considering their feedback. In our case we have implemented the survey mentioned above “Emoji and sentiment survey”, to collect in real time the employee experience (there is also a dedicated number in the survey for urgent situations), and “#yourvoice” survey, a monthly leadership questionnaire aiming to collect the employees’ feedback regarding the direct manager and leadership team. Using these 2 methods we can adapt our initiatives and we can make them more relevant for our people and also, we can tackle sensitive topics and punctual requests one by one.
- Tell us more about your diversity and inclusion strategy.
Teleperformance Romania is a company that excels in diversity (colleagues from more than 30 nationalities, 51% women and 49% men, NO BIAS for political, gender, sexual, ethnic, or religious orientation, nor for colleagues with disabilities) and yearly, on the World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development, observed on each May 21st, we organize events designed to highlight this amazing diversity that is so specific to our organization’s community.
In 2019, our company signed the Romanian Diversity Charter that was launched on 18th of April 2018 in Bucharest and it is one of the outcomes of a project I.D.E.A.S. (Innovation. Diversity. Economy. Awareness. Success.). The implementation of the Charter was co-funded by the Rights, Equality and Citizenship Program of the European Union. We are a truly multicultural team, each customer is unique, and our diversity allows us to interact with them in a unique way.
It is our duty as a responsible global organization to share with the world our strong efforts at a global and local level to show how we value diversity. And we do so by actively promoting gender equality, at all levels, across Teleperformance Romania, we empower professionals with disabilities and support employment of both young people at the beginning of their career as well as senior professionals.
- What did your employees appreciated in your offices and how do you think the working (from the office) environment will change post pandemic? What are the new top features?
Starting March 2020 all the Teleperformance Romania employees are working from home and we have used this time to enhance the spaces from our main building (Green Gate Building, Bucharest) and to fully renovate the interior of our secondary building from Mihail Sebastian street, Bucharest. All the enhancements focus on what we think is important in a pandemic and post pandemic period: respecting all the rules and best practices in terms of hygiene and protecting our employees’ health and making our spaces more attractive for our people (relaxation rooms, cafeterias etc.).
- Some of the employees appreciate WFH and also the flexibility it comes when choosing their location and program. Besides that, it’s a huge opportunity for companies to access new talent pools. Did your company consider working from anywhere? This includes anywhere in Romania or also abroad?
In our last pulse survey regarding working from home, 80% from our staff stated that they would prefer to work from home on the long run and only less than 5% want to return to the office. Based on these figures and on the lessons learnt in the pandemic period, I strongly believe that WFAA (working-from-anywhere-anytime) is the future of work. The stake in our industry is to fully prepare a flexible infrastructure (servers, platforms, applications, processes etc.) and to openly discuss with our customers regarding the benefits and the risks of this working arrangement. In terms of the legal environment, I think we have a strong base with the teleworking agreements, but I also consider that local and European legislation should be enriched for covering long-term working from other country (the dream of remote working from a tropical island) or hiring people who are residents of other countries in Romania (this could be a major breakthrough for multi-lingual hubs or for IT companies).
- Is there a channel/web page where people can learn more about your company and career opportunities?
Our plan is to grow the business and to attract new global customers in Romania, therefore my estimate is that we will open around 350 job opportunities for Romanian and foreign language speakers by the end of this year. Our career opportunities are available on our website https://careersromania.teleperformance.com/ and are also promoted by our partners from ejobs, bestjobs and hipo. You only need the requested language level and courage; we will handle the rest.