Insights from the perspective of an Executive Head-hunter in Romania.

In our profession we speak daily with senior management, our clients, and candidates. Of course, COVID and its implications are still a hot topic: what are the considerations, the plans, and the required changes for coming out of this situation even stronger.

We decided to put the learnings on a wider base and were sending out a questionnaire, to CEOs, Managing Directors and Human Resources Managers, making a full study from the results:

Keeping efficiency through working from home is the main challenge for the majority of the senior managers in this period of COVID. Why?

Are the employees really disengaged?

• Lacking information?
• Distracted by their family, children?
• Unclear targets and expectations?
• Lack of management?

There is a lot of uncertainty and guessing around about the potential reasons in the top management of companies. Though there is no need for that. There are easy to use tools for assessing the motivational issues of teams working from home – just to be applied! We have a very smart one too, by the way.

Therefore, it is no surprise that “increasing retention” is for one quarter of the senior management a top priority. Though in general the pressure on the labour market calmed down and staff turn-over is reducing. But we find, that up to 70% of the candidates we are approaching, are open for new challenges!The next major challenge is the necessity of “re-training of leadership skills” - 30% of our clients are facing this challenge. Managers must lead their teams differently for keeping up efficiency, moral and team-spirit. We know from clients with large workforces working from home: they lost 10% of the staff since COVID lockdown and home office!

25% of our clients are “searching for new type of talents for adapting the company to the new challenges”. What kind of talents? We shall write about it in one of the next post or please download our full study.

And 36% are facing the usual challenges of a crises: headcount reduction, unfortunately. But the sad reality is, that many businesses dropped a lot.

Dr Johannes Burghold, Managing Partner TRANSEARCH Romania Executive Search and Regional VP Eastern Europe.

The complete study can be downloaded from TRANSEARCH Romania LinkedIn page.

(p) - This article is an advertorial.