Banca Transilvania: A place where people can write their own career story

By Anda Sebesi

How would you describe your HR policy?

The main objectives of our HR Policy are focused on creating an environment where all of us, all #peopleofBT, grow both professionally and personally while delivering sustainable performance for our main stakeholders: clients, communities, and investors. Our leadership and management development programmes are among the strongest pillars of our HR Policies as they shape and transform our constructive, result-oriented, and human corporate culture, which is something we dearly treasure. Care is a competence we develop and measure regularly in all our managers, just as we measure performance and KPIs. Another strong focus for us in HR is on transparent, relevant, and continuous communication, accessible senior management, and a relaxed/casual working environment. We have repeatedly validated the fact that people want to connect with other people, both inside and outside our organisation. They want to meet, exchange ideas, have fun, and learn from each other—but they only want to do this with people they like.

What were the main initiatives the bank dedicated to its employees last year?

One of the initiatives that had an imense impact across the organisation last year was the GROW Experience, a project that aimed to map all positions in Banca Transilvania against a matrix of nine skills. We selected three core skills that we seek in all our colleagues—autonomy, collaboration, and resilience—and all our HR processes, from recruitment and selection to learning, performance evaluation, compensation, career management, and wellbeing, are built around these key traits. Our reskilling and upskilling programmes are also very popular. Between 50 and 60 colleagues start their second career with Banca Transilvania each year, pivoting from banking positions to IT by attending intensive technical learning programmes. One other major multi-year initiative that we started last year was the in-house development of an HR platform that integrates all HR processes.

What is your strategy in terms of attracting and retaining talent?

We are constantly conducting research inside and outside the organisation to learn about the expectations people have from their workplace. We use the results of these studies to identify those very specific areas where BT is or can become the best and we are investing our efforts in developing and promoting them. One such area is our care for the wellbeing of our colleagues and their famillies. Making sure our managers genuinly care for their team members, attracting people that have similar motivations and whose values resonate with Banca Transilvania’s, who are dynamic, willing to be of service to other people, building trust and creating opportunities for growth and sharing are just a few of the strategies we are using to retain talent. We are also on a continuous lookout for new sourcing areas among less privileged communities and we are investing in supporting them to acquire the knowledge and skills to increase their employability.