Daniel Metz, CEO of NTT DATA Romania: We are planning a new organizational culture, an inside-out approach, where collaboration is key

The power words for 2021 are:  Collaboration, Agile, Sustainability

Business as usual or the resetting of the entire business structure? Making the best of the lessons learned in 2020 and turning it into the business growth’s drivers in 2021? Envisioning a company structure built for people? Enablement of wellbeing, safety initiatives and   multi-leveled and hierarchy-flexible communication conduct?

Daniel Metz, CEO of NTT DATA Romania answered to the Outsourcing Today’s interview and addressed  the plans, the core values and the actual enablers for business growth that mark the beginning of 2021.

Keeping the momentum in 2021

We will definitely continue to actively interact with our clients, understand their challenges and needs and the new end customer behaviors. We shall get back to the office as soon as we are all safe and healthy and get the courage to start visiting our clients, travel again, invite clients to meet us. We are planning to start a hybrid home & office model.

We’ll continue to be competitive with this mindset: from a healthy competition nobody is defeated.

Our innovation strategy is focused on product creation from idea-to-market and idea management, with a dual scope: internal optimization and market-oriented products. A great focus will be on keeping sales & management up to date on the products of own IP in our portfolio offering (both internal and group IP) and going further with our Technology Radar initiative to asses new technologies against clients needs.

There is no longer such thing as business-as-usual

We need to start strategizing for sustainability in order to create a fairer society. The priority is the long-term health and well-being of citizens.

Now we can say we are prepared to bring in massive changes within a matter of weeks and months. This pandemic has digitally and mentally prepared us for the new economic era. Digital talents with business acumen are the asset now and this is the new mainstream.

A great reset is already happening due to the need for fast restoration of the manufacturing industry and heavy capital goods. New organization models are needed in telecommunications, fast-moving consumer goods and financial services. We are on the verge of creating an all-digital, work-from-anywhere world.

It is our priority to adapt to the present context and also get prepared to the next one which is going to be marked by a very dynamic and unpredictable evolution

The flag-ship project of 2020 which will continue in the first months of 2021 is the transformation of our organizational structures and the processes in a fluid, agile approach. We will continue to simplify and automate every process, structure and way of interaction from sales to delivery and all business support areas. All our departments and all managers in the company are at the moment analyzing the current situation and planning the post-pandemic organization.

We are at the moment planning for a new organizational culture, an inside-out approach, where collaboration is key

Our team is ready to get back at the office in a new, dynamic fashion, a hybrid model between home & office work.

Our efforts will continue to focus internally, on aligning the aspects of work (such as clarity of role, workload, work-family balance, interference of family stress with work, cyberslacking) with the individual characteristics of our colleagues relevant to work performance (general self-efficacy, determination of goals, self-organization, conscientiousness). We have conducted an internal study and these traits seem to correlate moderately to strongly with mental well-being (eg, exhaustion), with the feeling of loneliness, with performance in the context of telework and with performance at work, as well as with general job satisfaction.

I believe that a manager should be mature enough to understand that maturity and performance in a team – as in everything else in life takes time and implies experience

Things can’t be great at first. It will take time. One can not expect from others to always have the best answers. Especially when things change rapidly and new situations arise. Sometimes discerning is more important than being right. A good manager should be able to see mistakes from this perspective. Leading people into taking responsibility and asking themselves why they do a certain thing right before they do it is a great human trait.

My expectation is that us as managers can be shorter on debates and greater with regards to taking action, take the lead on constructive suggestion, argue less, do more. We need speed and for that we shall be brave enough to give up what is no longer useful. Internal bureaucracy, ineffective meetings and sales-delivery collaboration have already been analyzed and we have started specific actions in order to getting things aligned. Until the end of this fiscal year we will put in place a new organizational structure and we will redefine everything from our budgeting concept to the way we interact with each other and with our clients.