Business Ideas in Romania

stand and deliver…part III

• Posted by Steve on February 19th, 2007 filed in Education, General

As mentioned, here is an answer to a questions I received from the audience at a presentation on entrepreneurism in Romania at the Academy of Economic Studies (described in my previous post):

One of the participants asked… “Are Romanian employees harder to manage than others?”

Whether it is due to the serious lack of mid and upper management capability in Romania or a legacy of the socialist era’s workers desire to say “Yes” and do “No”… companies here do have noticeable difficulty in getting their workforce to execute their plans…

However…

As long as expectations are clearly indicated (and repeated often in written and verbal form), results are monitored, and resources receive coaching on their performance… I have not noticed a significant difference in “manageability”. For my company, I strongly emphasis our “performance management system”; starting with Goal Setting on specific topics and clearly indicating the firm’s expectations on these areas. We carefully monitor persons new to a task then give them independence as they prove themselves. This is no different an approach here in Bucharest than in Los Angeles or elsewhere.

I also think it helps to make it clear what is absolutely critical and what is not so critical. New employees anywhere often have a hard time trying to figure out what is expected of them. We train and discuss often about important topics such as how to be professional in front of a client, hitting deadlines, careful listening and notetaking, etc. As long as folks follow achieve these objectives, they have considerable freedom in how they choose to do their work.