“Continental has over 20,000 employees in Romania, from operators to cybersecurity specialists. After the pandemic and the return to the usual way of working, we realized that employees no longer want to return to the office or want a partial return to the office.

An organizational culture based on healthy principles can also work with employees working from home. The most important value in the company is trust. We trust our employees to do their job. But when there are no results, we can withdraw that benefit for employees,” Lucia Iliescu, HR Manager, Continental Romania said at Workplace of the Future organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest.

Key statements:

• A good leader can be close to employees even if employees work remotely. A good leader can build a healthy relationship with employees and define the organizational culture.
• A trend that I have noticed is that when an employee is in the home office, they tend to do more all the time. If they don’t commute to the office, employees gain time to work longer, to meet certain KPIs and to obtain performance bonuses. It is very important to have a balance regarding this aspect.
• The biggest challenge we have is that the industry in Romania is no longer attractive to young people. The wellbeing that we promote is for office workers. The basis of the industry are the people on the shop floor; they are the most numerous and will be the most numerous in the future.
• This part of wellbeing should be developed a lot on the shop floor as well. We do this at Continental and we try as much as possible to come up with ideas so that production operators have the best possible experiences. For example, we now have a project through which we provide financial education for employees on the shop floor. At the same time, we want to help the children of employees have access to a better education through various CSR activities.