Getting to know your employees

Newsroom 01/04/2013 | 11:37

For the second year now, Dorin Bodea has released a study on the values of Romanian employees. Of the 1,481 participants nationwide, more than 92 percent were highly educated and over 80 percent were employees. The research method was to assess the importance of 40 values.

What are the differences between this year’s study and that of the previous year?

In our first study (on Romanian cultural characteristics), we evaluated 80 cultural and behavioral characteristics, while in this study we measured values, with a focus on their importance ​​to Romanian employees. However, we can say that the two studies have a common conclusion – a lack of esteem for labor and the main drawbacks (desire to be the boss, the tendency to gossip, fatalism, pessimism, resignation, the tendency to imitate, superficiality, laziness).

What cultural attributes are most common among local employees?

The core values ​​of Romanian employees are financial gain, power, recognition of others, fame, development, freedom, peace and competition. These eight values ​​show the social division between Romanian employees, each heavily centered on themselves by comparison with other colleagues. These core values ​​depict a cultural pattern characterized mainly by egocentrism, and less by moral values ​​and achievement through labor.

What should expat managers know about Romanian employees?

I believe that an expat manager who interacts with Romanian employees needs to know the core values ​​(widely shared) and the structural ideal values. We have already talked about the core values. When it comes to ideal values, we have confidentiality, honesty, excellence, change and professional and personal development. The structural values are excellence and perfectionism, honesty and integrity, affiliation and interdependence, power and fame, adventure and experimentation, but these values are suppressed for most employees.

Moreover, these core values reveal what it is important for Romanian employees and what motivates them on the short term, while the ideal values ​​express what they would like on a long-term basis. The structural values ​​tell us what to do, how we can perform in the current cultural context.

Along with these values, it is important to be familiar with some tendencies shared by most Romanian employees, in order to understand and to build a framework of performance necessary to obtain results. The enormous distance between how they self-evaluate in contrast with how they evaluate others, the big focus on appearance, a focus on the past and present, strong emphasis on the emotional component and the low regard for labor and morality best summarize the profile of the Romanian employee.

What motivates the Romanian employee?

When we are in a management position, we often ask how to establish a framework and a culture of performance, how to motivate employees in order to bring about sustainable improvement in their performance. Speculating on their core values ​​(money, power, fame, promotion, competition, recognition), we obtain effective results only for the short term. But for the medium and long term, we have to do more. For a constructive culture based on performance prediction, structural values ​​play a decisive role. For any manager, knowledge and stimulation of the structural values ​​(in particular excellence and perfectionism, honesty and integrity, affiliation) can be a way to build a culture of sustainable performance.

Most Romanian employees are not satisfied with their professional development and the recognition they receive for their achievements. Most of them are highly self-motivated in the pursuit of status and respect, and launch themselves into a fierce competition with other colleagues for power or promotion. Understanding the value cycle motivation-stress-performance is mandatory for most Romanian employees, as six of the eight core values ​​generate stress, one of the main sources of over-motivation. These values ​​lead to self-expression, putting extreme pressure on it, a feeling that can lead to poor performance.

Sustainable motivation appeals to strengths, which have a direct impact on achievement. According to our study, the most effective motivation techniques are promotion, professional and personal development, public recognition and handwriting recognition, spare time (days off) and contests, while the most effective rewards are money, handwriting recognition, trophies, and VIP cards.

Oana Vasiliu

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