Working Romania | Andreea Baciu (UiPath): Work-from-home will be the norm, not just a benefit

UiPath is another fully digitized company, with a quarter of employees already working from home, so the crisis didnot change to many things. The ecosystem allowed to switch very easy to work-from-home, as Andreea Baciu, Vice President Global talent at UiPath said at Business Review’s Working Romania event.

”We also had a heads up from colleagues in China so we mobilized to prepare for the crisis from a very early stage. Colleagues responded very well, with an unprecedented mobilization. They work day and night and are so responsible that we have to launch challenges like “no more meetings Friday,” said Baciu.

In terms of customer support, UiPath offers over 400 case studies in the site that help companies better understand what needs to be done during this period. ” We also have courses through UiPath Academy, a free platform through which anyone can learn how to build their own software robot using RPA technology. We already have 550,000 students and 40,000 certified professionals on the platform,” says Baciu.

”What we do today: in our company the community was guided by the HR department, but many initiatives and projects came from the employees, without our support. Yoga or meditation sessions shared with colleagues, or a drawing competition for children, where we also have prizes for them.

Following internal donation campaigns among UiPath employees around the world, UiPath Foundation provided protection equipment to medical institutions across Romania and continued to support the children enrolled in its educational programs and their families. Also, UiPath Foundation partnered with Digital Nation who initiated and implemented the national ‘Professor in Online’ training course. With the support of UiPath volunteers, some processes targeting the teachers onboarding experience have been automated. UiPath Unite is also a community through which people contribute to the regions they belong to,” says Baciu.

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As the future of work is concerned, the most important change is the change in employees priorities and how they work. ”If until the crisis work-from-home was a benefit that many companies offered, now it will be the norm. Moreover, we should look at the time dedicated to working. I think the norm of 5 working days a week will no longer be relevant and we will see people who say they want to work only 3 or 4 days a week. And the human resources department as well as the entire community will have to build an ecosystem that integrates the new conditions,” says Andreea Baciu.

Work-from-home will be the norm as many companies from the service and tech industry will adopt it. Hubs like Mindspace will be the  main place where people gather, while big investments for offices or big buildings will be postponed or stopped.

The strategic planning cycle will also change. ”If in the past we had planning for 3-5 years, the implementation cycle will be at most quarterly. We will think in quarters rather than the years. It is also a shift between what will happen globally and what will be done locally. We will look and buy more at what is done locally and less at what comes from outside,” says Baciu.

Another change for companies will be the change of focus from higher and higher numbers in revenue and profit to sustainable figures that will allow them to survive for a very long time.