“Things have changed a lot in the last 5 years. Regarding the workplace, I notice that there is a growing desire to meet again at the office, to talk, to socialize. It is very difficult to find an optimal solution for the current work context. If someone has the ideal solution, we are ready to learn and adapt. We are still experimenting. We have not reached an ideal solution. For some, it works as we are now, in hybrid mode. Some people almost expect someone to come up with an idea, a working solution that suits them. But it is clear that we have not yet reached a stable form regarding the way of working,” Teodora Todoran, Associate Vice President, Wipro Technologies said at Workplace of the Future conference organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest.
“We moved to a headquarters somewhere during the pandemic. A very nice headquarters, wow, we never had anything like this before. But now I have to say that that space no longer suits us. We have all the facilities that we did not have, but it seems that it is not enough already. Whether we are talking about the training rooms, the conference rooms, the way people choose to come to the offices all on Wednesdays or Thursdays and the rest of the days the offices are mostly empty.
I think it was proven during the pandemic that we can work just as well from home, so we could continue to work from there. At the same time, we have clients who want us to be permanently at the office and offer the services from the office. This also happens and it works very well.
For example, in America we have a client who requests – for security and confidentiality reasons – that the entire team stays at the office, but this is an exceptional situation.
Speaking now strictly of Romania, it turned out that it was possible to work with the same clients from home. With the return to the office, clients preferred to have the whole team come to the office. There are several reasons behind this, but not related to security and privacy. This is simply their model, their policy.
Technically, we have all the necessary solutions to secure platforms, information, confidentiality. All this is set up. I think it’s more about what happens beyond the operations and beyond the services that we provide. It’s about mental health, socialization, the way I’m glad to wake up in the morning to open my laptop, or I’m glad to go out and then open my laptop after I get to the office.
Regarding AI, we started to educate the population, so that people understand what AI means, from fundamentals, risks, compliance, etc. We have a team dedicated to this. We are at the moment when we are educating ourselves in Romania about AI. We have dedicated teams that talk to our existing customers to see how else we can step in and supplement services for optimization or other things needed.
The office spaces that we are looking for, or that we will look for in the future, will be a little more individual, but at the same time, they must also offer the option of socializing. It is clear that the spaces where we work now no longer correspond to our needs, although the offices are absolutely gorgeous, but something else is needed.”
