Our Romania Operations Manager, Dan Kulcsar, was featured in fwdBV this month!
The business environment in Romania has, without doubt, been very impactful on the construction market in the last few years. Whether we are talking about civil or industrial construction, business dynamics have always influenced the dynamics of the entire economic environment in Romania.
In recent years, Brasov has experienced an absolutely special dynamic from this point of view, a dynamic structured on two levels:
- on the one hand, civil construction - many real estate developers have found Brasov to be a very good market for apartment buildings
- and on the other hand, industrial construction took off with a growing number of factories in the city below Tâmpa.
The very high market demand, especially when it comes to residential construction, has almost always led to artificial growth of the companies operating in the field. Their tendency is generally to build (and implicitly sell) as quickly as possible, a trend that has made matters such as business strategy, the definition of internal processes and standards, and the induction and training of specialists receive very little attention or sometimes be completely neglected.
An organization that grows rapidly due to high market demand for the product sold (apartments, in the case of construction companies) and does not grow its healthy internal structures or make significant investments in people, can not be a long-term sustainable company. Fortunately, there are a number of consulting service providers on the market that support companies in this niche.
We are basically talking about two distinct directions:
- preparing the organization for growth and optimizing internal processes
- and continuous training of employees, especially in the context in which the recruitment market for construction specialists is very niche and difficult.
Therefore, if we are talking about the first direction, that of the organization, the top management priority should be openness to a thorough audit process done throughout the entire organization and should include at least: an audit of management systems (if any), an audit of the processes within the company and the departments involved, an audit of the human resources department and, last but not least, an audit of the financial department. All these actions should be carried out by an external company so that the risk of subjective involvement of the auditor in the audit reports is minimized. The conclusions of these audits will be structured in a reporting framework that will very clearly show the points that need to be improved/corrected/implemented so that the company can operate optimally. Such audits can lead to obtaining the necessary quality certificates in construction (ISO 9001 - Quality Management, ISO 14001 - Environmental Management, and OHSAS18001 - Certification for Occupational Health and Safety).
We then discuss the human resources within the company. We place this discussion in the context of an extremely difficult recruitment market for construction specialists. A market with growing demand from employers, but fewer and fewer specialists (many left for various countries in Europe or the United Arab Emirates, where wage levels are significantly higher than those in Romania). In other words, employers find it increasingly difficult to attract specialists, with increasing effort and implicit costs.
In this context, the priority of management should be to work on the retention of existing specialists in the company. Unfortunately, many employers (not only those in the construction business) understand retention to merely be salary increases and the granting of bonuses. Of course, the salary policy is a necessary condition for increasing the retention rate of employees, but it is not a sufficient one.
Retention means much more than that and I will summarize below some important aspects from my point of view:
- Defining clear, fluent, and transparent recruitment, selection, AND induction processes in the company. These should be focused on creating a pleasant experience for the candidate and later on for the employee. These two components have moved away from strict technical procedures to creating experiences for new colleagues.
- The formulation of career plans so that colleagues can have an idea of the requirements for promotion within the company.
- Defining fluent internal and external communication processes that give colleagues certainty and clarity regarding the expectations that the company has from them, but this also gives managers clarity in terms of the expectations of people in their teams.
- Development of actions to strengthen the sense of belonging to the employer brand.
- Continuous discussions with members of all teams and the realization of individualized training plans, formulated according to the needs of each person. These needs can be very diverse: leadership, emotional intelligence, management skills, finance for non-finance, recruitment for non-recruiters, etc.
- Choosing training providers to focus on providing learning experiences to training participants and not on the mechanical delivery of the information contained in course materials.
- Choosing training providers that offer innovative learning tools: digital learning management systems, digital platforms customized to the specific business and activity of the client company, virtual classrooms (with elements of virtual reality and augmented reality) in which course participants have an "avatar" that goes through all kinds of unique learning experiences, "safe place" type training that allows learning according to the pace of each participant and that are adapted to the absolutely unique and variable time budgets held by each person. Last but not least, VR & AR applications offer unique and highly adapted virtual experiences. Such applications also allow remote support, remote management, and even remote auditing of certain process sequences or production lines.
We are certainly going through a period in which the focus of managers in companies should not be to attract the best candidates in the shortest possible time, but first and foremost to focus inside the company, where we have processes, procedures, objectives, and performance criteria but especially people. To have effective processes, procedures, business objectives, and performance criteria, we need to look at the people, get to know them, understand them and be constantly concerned with their growth and development but also with their emotional intelligence. All this can quickly lead the business to the heights of success, or collapse it very quickly.
Speak to us at ENCONA about your auditing, training, and innovative technology needs.
The original article in Romanian is included here:
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