What are the best ways to support employees, in the current context, so they feel safe? What physical, emotional and financial protection measures are companies taking for their people?

These were the questions addressed by the guest speakers at the online event Bright Talks in Difficult Times, organised by Cariere magazine and EY. The webinar is part of a series of online events designed to support the business community by sharing companies’ best practices and expert advice.

Among the speakers was our colleague, Nevenca Doca, Senior Executive Director, Human Resources, who spoke about the bank’s priorities from an HR perspective — keeping employees safe and healthy while enabling them to continue serving customers. At present [April], about 25% of head office and 35% of the branch network are working from home, and the BT Customer Care team is on duty 24/7. Over 400 BT branches are open, with hours from 9:00 to 16:00, and in Italy (Rome), from 8:00 to 13:15 every Tuesday and Thursday.

Nevenca Doca’s remarks on BT, supporting employees and Human Banking:

The bank’s challenges during this period:

• Life at the bank since the end of February has been very different from the first two months of the year — and very intense.
• Our challenges are mainly around physical security because we have not stopped operations and we have a few thousand people working in branches across the country, face-to-face with customers. Some of those customers are our fellow citizens who have returned to the country in recent weeks and need to carry out urgent transactions.
• Our front-office colleagues felt particular pressure, especially in early March, until we managed to roll out physical protection measures everywhere: hand sanitiser, gloves, masks, protective screens, and standard safety measures that customers must follow.
• We have kept branches open, given the expectations of our customers and the authorities. Closing and waiting for the threat to pass is not an option for us.
• Over 3,100 colleagues, mainly mothers, are at home because they have children aged up to 12. Some are in self-isolation, including because they live with people working on the front line.

The bank’s priorities for #peopleofBT:

• Physical and emotional safety has been our top priority.
• Our first measures were to protect our colleagues physically: we cancelled all travel, domestic and international, classroom training, and any large meetings from late February, even before the first cases appeared in the country.
• Another step was to split teams in two or three and distribute them across multiple locations, so that if one team has to isolate we can continue operations with the others.
• Some colleagues whose previous activities have paused are taking on other tasks, such as customer interactions via the call center, where volumes have risen sharply — one of the channels customers can use to request payment deferrals.

Teleworking: from a BT pilot slated for launch in April to a mass rollout in March:  

• When the crisis began, our priority was to see what we could do from home, because as of February we did not have a teleworking procedure in place at the bank.
• That said, our priority plan for this year did include launching, on April 1, a teleworking pilot with a few departments. We found ourselves having to do a mass implementation in just a few days.

We would like to thank the Bright Talks in Difficult Times participants for what they shared: Gabriela Alexandru (HR Director, Michelin Central Europe); Corina Mandoiu (Associate Partner, Personal Income Tax and Social Contributions Department, EY Romania) and Ioan Dumitrascu (Partner and Head of the Employment Law Practice, Filip & Company), with Horatiu Cocheci, Director, People Advisory Services, EY Romania, as moderator. You can watch the video of the meeting here.