As countries across the globe move into lockdown and governments declare national states of emergency, it’s clear that these are unprecedented times.
While that naturally means some changes to the way we work, at Stefanini, we’re determined that some things will stay the same: our employees will continue to feel supported and will be able to work safely and productively, while our clients will receive the same first-rate service, without interruption.
As a result, we’re speaking with people across the business to get some quick insights on how Stefanini is adapting in order to achieve these goals. For this first update, we caught up with Andreea-Maria Miron, People & Culture Manager at Stefanini EMEA.
Remote working
In the interests of public health, employee safety and business continuity, nearly all of our 2,500 EMEA employees across Europe are now working from home.
While this has involved providing laptops where required and scaling up VPN capacity to ensure everyone has secure access to important files, many teams had already been building up their remote working capacity long before the coronavirus outbreak. As a result, the foundations for a smooth transition were already in place.
All teams are also being encouraged to join regular video catch-up calls to ensure they remain connected.
“It’s been really encouraging to see how quickly our teams have adapted to a new way of working. The fact that we already had a highly developed remote working strategy across much of EMEA has allowed everyone to pull together and adapt quickly. We’ve seen that in the last month there has been no drop in productivity whatsoever, which shows the importance of the foundation we had in place, along with the great effort demonstrated by our teams,” says Andreea-Maria.
Flexible focus
Where client commitments allow, Stefanini is also moving towards a more flexible approach to working.
“We are aware that not only for us, as an organization, but for our colleagues as well, working from home comes with a number of challenges: negative news which can affect one’s morale, or one’s ability to organize work from home, especially for our colleagues who have small children. We try to focus more on tasks and objectives, rather than on a fixed schedule,” adds Andreea-Maria.
“We believe we’re well placed from a business perspective to respond to the current circumstances and we want to thank and support our teams who have ensured there has been a smooth transition, allowing us to look after our people and deliver for our clients,” concludes Andreea-Maria.
