Meet Florentina Ifrim, HR Manager at Softia, who’s a great professional and a great person. Follow the interview below and get to know our awesome HR Manager.
What does Softia mean to you?
Softia has many roles in my professional life. In the beginning it was the place where I started to learn more about the Human Resources domain, about processes, documents, technical roles, many areas that were new to me. After the 1st year of growing, my experience in Softia started to be more about people. My mantra from that moment has been: people are the base for every business. Currently, Softia is my favorite place to work. We grew considerably in five years and my daily challenges are bigger now. I have a lot to learn about me and my skills every day.
You have been part of the Softia team since January 2017, what exactly contributed to being loyal to Softia?
My desire is to be part of a company where a new milestone is set every year. In order to achieve it, we need to think out of the box and to learn new methods fast in order to maintain the happiness of our employees.
What do you appreciate or like the most about Softia?
I like a lot that we strive to be better every year. Every time we analyze what we did in the past, we try to find a way to implement a new strategy for the next period. We try to involve all the employees in each feedback session and to build an improved version of our business model around the employees’ feedback.
What are the most important values for you as a leader/manager?
The short answer is “use each day to learn something new about yourself“. I encourage my team to be very close to our colleagues, to have a very trustful relationship and to be their trusted advisors. In my professional life the communication with my colleagues helped me to improve the way I conduct the interviews and 1:1 meetings as well as the way to create the internal procedures for the company.
What is the biggest challenge in being a manager/leader at Softia?
Being vulnerable and creating a safe space for my team where they can have the confidence to say anything.
How do you measure the success as a manager/leader? And the performance of Softia`s employees?
All the employees have to set performance objectives both project and team related. As a manager I measure the project objectives by asking for clients’ feedback and for the team objectives I use 360 performance reviews. It’s very important for me that all the objectives for my colleagues to be SMART (Specific (simple, sensible, significant) Measurable (meaningful, motivating) Achievable (agreed, attainable) Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based) Time bound (time-based, time limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive)) because I want to be sure that the goals are clear and reachable. Another important aspect is that each of my colleagues contribute when we set the performance objectives, because behind the evaluation procedure, we desire to help our collegues to progress and we try to create for them a career path in the company.
How do you encourage the professional development of Softia`s employees?
Together with all the managers from Softia, I try to find out what the professional and personal objectives of our colleagues are and we create a development plan for different time frames. We can have coaching sessions, internal or external trainings or a technical mentor who can help them to achieve those objectives.
What would you share with a candidate who wants to join Softia?
We can talk about this subject for two whole days, but I would like to share something with my future colleagues: Softia is a place where you can find a lot of people ready to help you to improve both your technical and soft – skills. We explore the latest technologies, fully work from home, we have different types of projects and we organize many company events where the main purpose is to get to know each other.
What inspires you to become a better manager? Share a recent inspiration/ thought.
I know that my role is to help myself and people around me to progress, we can always become better than we used to be and we can find a way to explore our full potential. One of my inspiration for being a better manager is my team. They give me a lot of ideas and each idea helps us to grow. Over the past years I have been reading some books on coaching and the most important principle drawn from there is to do things that bring you happiness, which is also another source of daily inspiration for me.