The 11th edition of HR Executive Learning event series hosted by Ideograf dealt with the topic of “Team Dynamics. Managing Conflict & Building a Team in a Pandemic & Beyond”. Anca Decu, Human Resources Manager CORA, and Adrian Stanciu, Associate Dean of Knowledge and Leadership with the Maastricht School of Management Romania, shared their insights with people managers, HR leaders and entrepreneurs about preserving team spirit despite differences in responsibilities and privileges and about human dynamics and the creative power of interpersonal conflicts. The keynote speeches were followed by a live Q&A, moderated by Sandra Jitianu, business owner IDEOGRAF. 

Anca Decu, Cora’s Human Resources Manager with 17 years of experience in HR and the retail industry, shared the actions that allowed the retail chain to keep their workforce engaged and team spirit alive during a period with increased demand, a 100% growth in online activity and 200 employees on key positions working from home. “To work in a physical store is not a prize. It’s very important to know where you stand in terms of loyalty and engagement of your employees, to know your strengths and weaknesses”, Ms. Decu explained. The two measures that had the strongest impact were allocating a special bonus for the teams working in the stores and communicating intensely with frontline workers while showing appreciation for their heroic involvement. These, along with having volunteers from the marketing, HR and procurement team help prepare deliveries for online orders, allowed Cora to successfully navigate through the tough first lockdown months. Besides the increase in productivity, there was a 60% decrease of voluntary leaves compared to the previous year, while absenteeism was also down.

After an introduction in game theory, Adrian Stanciu explained that the fundamental requirements for having a team are having a common purpose that serves individual goals, requesting personal responsibility and accountability, and creating equity. The ‘acid test’ would be to check if people can be successful while their team is not: if the system allows for somebody to be successful in a losing team one does in fact not have a team. While discussing conflict and trust, Adrian Stanciu proffered that Romania probably has the lowest level of social trust in the world. “We speak about trust in our organisations, but if you look at processes and systems, they are built on the assumption that people are potential crooks and slackers”, the professor argued. In the second part his keynote, Adrian Stanciu’s shared the process of how to use conflict without allowing it to become dysfunctional and destroy relationships but rather turn it into a constructive disagreement.

The live Q&A session that followed tackled topics like whose job it is to manage people, what HR can do to help operational leadership understand the way human dynamics works, what can and what cannot be solved by KPIs, how to affiliate people remotely, radical transparency in organisations and the two victims of variable pay.

This learning event was hosted by Sandra Jitianu – business owner IDEOGRAF and director of the HR Executive Learning Series and was supported by Stein Bestasig Insurance Broker, the Maastricht School of Management Romania as academic partner and Romania Insider as main media partner.

The recording of the keynote speeches as well as information about Stein Bestasig’s offering of a free screening of the existing insurance coverage is available here.

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The HR Executive Learning seminar series was launched in March 2019 and is curated by Sandra Jitianu, management consultant, as a platform for the meaningful exchange of ideas & HR best practices. 

IDEOGRAF was founded in 2017 by Sandra Jitianu, management consultant with expertise in Human Resources and Change Management, having 15 years of project management and consulting missions in industries including utilities, oil and gas, financial services, retail, manufacturing and professional services. Sandra is the organizer and director of the HR Executive Learning series. She is also a management consultant and performance coach and teaches Mental Fitness.