George Proorocu

Hello everyone, and welcome to our talk. Today, we are going to tell you the story of our past two years, and we are going to see together how we approached and overcame the COVID-19 challenges.

I am joined today by two of my colleagues: Mihai Popa, who is the head of Global Consumer Lending Platform; Mihai Roman, who is the Engineering Chapter Lead within Cybersecurity and Fraud; and I am George, the IT Ops Chapter Lead within the same area, Cybersecurity and Fraud.

A little bit about ING: ING is a Dutch multinational banking and financial services corporation, with headquarters in Amsterdam. We currently employ around 52,000 people, out of which around 30% are engineers. We support over 39 million customers while operating in around 40 countries within Europe, North America, South America, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia.

For me, it was quite interesting because I was actually in Asia when the pandemic hit the news, and things there escalated quickly. This photo was taken on the 1st of February in Japan, and basically there things were taken seriously from the beginning. I still remember that face masks went out of stock literally in a few hours after everything hit the news.

From there, I had to fly directly into a business trip in Romania. When I arrived in Europe, I was actually a bit shocked. Coming from Asia, where very strict testing was in place, masks were already mandatory in many places, and in some areas they were already testing the temperature, I arrived into a place where people were actually looking strange at me because I was wearing a face mask. Even if everything was okay, of course, I started wearing the mask permanently as a precaution to protect everyone. At that point, there were not so many things known about corona, and since I was going to the office, I wanted to have some extra safety measures in place. This is me in the office on the 11th of February 2020.

Once the local authorities decided the new rules, in most of the European countries we started working fully remotely. That is the point when the initial challenges appeared. It started with some generic IT challenges that probably many corporations faced, like assuring a VPN connection to support all the employees; the internet at home, because in some buildings they were sharing a connection and since everyone was at home they started having bandwidth issues; and different equipment problems with laptops, headphones, and how you were shipping them since people could not come to the office.

All this came together with our adapted way of working. We call this the home way of working. We suddenly had more meetings, more calls, more emails. We had to adapt the time we spent on chatting in order to also do our daily tasks. Since you could not just go directly and talk with your colleagues anymore, you had to message, email, try to have a call or a video call, and so on.

In our case, we were somehow lucky because most of our engineers were already working one or two days from home. They were somehow used to it, and they already had a place from where they were working. But now it was a bit different because all of a sudden they were with their whole family at home. In some cases they had young children, they were easily distracted, and they did not have the right environment to focus on their daily tasks.

But let Mihai tell us how all this impacted our teams and how things evolved in the following months. Mihai?

Mihai Popa

Thanks a lot, George, for this beautiful introduction and for reminding us about how all this started. Probably for most of you this is not new. You just remembered how things started. Actually, what we want to do today is to share with you some of our stories and the way we went through this situation.

For the first three months, what we tried to do was to emphasize two things. One was accountability, and the other one was trust. We said, yes, we are going to provide to all the engineers the right tools so they can do their work. We increased the capacity for VPNs. We told everyone to stay at home. But then we also started to tell them, look, you are a part of this company, which means that you are accountable and responsible for the work that you are going to have to do. We are not going to check you on that, and we actually cannot check you if you are at home. This is also very linked with trust: I give you accountability, and I trust that you are going to do your work.

Some of you might smile and say that some people probably did not behave correctly. That is true. I think this is in human nature, and in the end, everywhere, this actually happened. But it is important to know that in most cases the engineers actually did the work in the right way.

We observed a couple of behaviors. The first one was that of course the engineers were like, okay, I am going to work less, but then they started to actually behave in a proper way. We noticed that most of them started to be tired because they were actually doing more meetings and more work than before. That was a problem which we did not foresee. Others, maybe 3% or maybe 5% of them, started to work a little bit less, but that did not actually last that much.

Then, moving ahead, we said that we have to lead by example. There is no better person than us as managers to show the engineers how we actually have to behave. Both Mihai, George, and myself, in the areas where we are working, said it is important to show that yes, we respect our colleagues, we respect the timing for the meetings, and we do our work as good as we can.

We tried to organize meetings or coffees just to catch up. At the beginning, probably this happened in your organizations as well: people were not doing that. People started to lose contact. So we organized virtual games or virtual coffees. We organized online events, and we did regular check-ins. Looking back in hindsight, you think this is obvious. At that moment in time, it was not obvious. Everybody did not know exactly when the crisis was going to finish, and we also did not know how long we would be able to cope with this.

At a certain moment in time, people started to get tired and started to feel that they were losing contact with their colleagues. The typical gossip, and I think everybody gossips in every company, started to fade a little bit out. These were the first three months.

We want to share also how ING supported us, because we did not do this completely on our own. For example, ING provided us a rotation system. Especially when the health situation improved a little bit, ING said: look, if you want to come to the office because you have kids at home and it is very difficult with them, or if you are feeling lonely, because of course there are also people who do not have a relationship, you can come to the office.

They also gave the possibility to work from another country. Europe is a big continent, but not so big, so you were actually allowed to go to your home country and work from there. In some of the countries, ING offered a certain budget to acquire different equipment, like an extra screen, a keyboard, or a special mouse. As managers, we felt very good about this because we felt that the company supported us. We were not alone.

On some other things you see here on the slide: we were encouraged to work from home 60% to 70% and maybe come to the office if that was possible. We did pulse check surveys, and then we had some actions from those surveys, and we tried to improve the quality of our engineers' work experience. One of the most important ones, at least for me, which I admit was not invented at ING and we inherited from other companies, was that we said we were going to have days where people do not have meetings. For example, it can be Wednesday or Friday, a day where people can actually focus. At the beginning it was very difficult to focus due to such an amount of meetings, discussions, coffees, and so on.

This is how ING supported us. This is actually what we did. Now I am going to let Mihai tell us a little bit about what we did and about the awareness and security part, which he is a master of. Mihai, I will let you take it from here.

Mihai Roman

We had a quick look at what ING as a company provided for us and how it supported us. But we are all humans, without taking into account if you are a manager or a simple engineer, so we had to pay more attention to our interactions and how we interact with the others.

A simple thing that may be said is: when you do a call, make sure that your camera is on. Of course, not everybody is comfortable with doing that. Some people are making jokes: I am not going to turn on my camera until 10:00 a.m.; I still need my two coffees in the morning before I am fully running. All these small points helped us in our daily interaction with each other.

You do not have an easy way anymore to read the body language of your colleagues, of your manager, or of your team. Paying attention in meetings or to the voice of people became more and more important. Of course, there are situations, as Mihai mentioned, about having the correct hardware, which helped a lot in the last 18 months-plus to go through this situation.

Looking from our perspective as leads, as being part of the leadership team, we had and we still have a lot of meetings. We looked at how we can start to interact again with people in person. When the situation got a bit better, we started to have one-to-ones, or I will not call them team meetings, but just to gather each other for half an hour or one hour outside in the middle of a park and have a simple discussion, which can simply replace one meeting or two meetings that we would have had in front of our laptops.

Last but not least, all three of us are engineers at our roots. We are dealing with engineers all day long, so there were things that had to change. When we were in the office, we had a certain network there which was not easily accessible from outside, so we had to go via VPN. One of the first actions taken was to switch all non-critical functionalities and systems that we need to do our work outside of the VPN. Of course, that came with other challenges, which I am going to tackle in a second, but in the end, we have to trust each other.

As a leader, you can say that we need to trust our people. As an engineer, you can say that we need to trust our leadership. But as I have mentioned about virtual private networks and ways to make the life of every employee easier or smoother during this strange period, I want to switch the focus a bit from the situation we faced to what we had to take into account on the longer run during these 18 months.

Initially, we got the government saying everybody has to work from home. There were strict rules and so on. Our first reaction was that we need to ensure that our people are healthy, not only due to the virus, but also that their mental health is in a proper state, and also from a security perspective.

In mid-March last year, everybody was in the office. We had access to a secure network. As of the 16th of March, everybody was at home. What happened with all that security? We moved out with VPN. Everybody is probably tired of approving on their mobile all kinds of multi-factor authentication for all kinds of systems. But here there was space for people to not pay attention. For example, if I have to access three systems and I get six notifications to approve access, one of the six may not be one triggered by me. That opened the door also for some attacks and threats.

One of the actions and messages that we sent and encouraged was: do not approve anything if you have not done an action upfront. It may sound silly, but being all day in front of a screen and dealing with technology, it is very easy to go over these small details.

George mentioned in the beginning that we had devices which had to be shipped or devices that broke. We have colleagues dealing with confidential papers, so physical security became another problem we had to deal with: how people were going to the office when they had to deal with confidential information or confidential documents; laptops were broken and how we had to deal with this. There are situations where people could go to the office to get a replacement. In other situations, not so. It was not only about keeping everybody safe from the virus perspective, but we also had to keep our working environment safe.

We went through quite a lot in the last year and a half. If we try to look ahead, honestly, for me, the office will not look like before, like I knew it at the end of 2019 and early 2020. We will have to adapt. We adapted a lot in the last period, so we need to find a balance. Hybrid, office, home, any combination with a certain percentage or not, is applicable as long as everybody feels safe and we have trust between ourselves as a peer, as a leader, and as a team. We need to find a balance between these three points.

There are colleagues, and we know people in this world, not only in our company, who have a certain situation or feel in a certain way when they are at home versus when they are in the office. Somebody told me simply: I am not going to go ever to the office except if we have a clear workshop or a day when we have to decide something. Others say, yes, I would like to go more to the office. So it is not going to be a 50/50 like it was before, home and office, or hybrid with office and so on. It is going to change. We are going to try something for a month. We are going to try something the month after. We had to adapt, and we will have to adapt.

In the end, the office was a space where people were together. We learned, and we did the same in a fully virtual environment. For the future, why not let everybody, let all the teams decide by themselves if they want to be in the office, if they want to be part in the office and part at home? As long as they have the environment to have their conversation and to make the progress that we are expecting and they are expecting from each other, why not? The sky is the limit. The ground rules will be just to have the means and the ways for people to get in contact and to move forward. In the end, I can translate it simply: we have to be agile. We were agile, but that should not stop now.

Looking also at functional positions and locations of engineers: George mentioned the 52,000 employees of ING. Today, the three of us are dealing at least with engineers located in six or seven countries on a day-to-day basis. We have to go forward like this. Two years ago, we could say: I need to have discussions with three people located in the US or in the Netherlands, and I am flying, driving, or taking the train to that location. That will not happen anymore. We will have to do it with what we have now and make the best out of it.

One important thing that maybe in the beginning of this situation was missed is celebration. In the end, we do not have to celebrate only successes. We have to celebrate also mistakes, as long as they do not go over and over and we learn something out of them. We need to understand who we are, where we want to go, and what we can do to have a smooth road.

Habits: we all have habits. Going to the office can be considered a habit. Now, working from home is a new habit. We will have to change it in one way or another as the world is changing, with or without the current health situation, but we will have to change.

Last but not least, for the future, people are the most important pillar in the discussion. Trust them, give them power, and they will give you back exactly the same.

As a short conclusion: we went through extraordinary times with exceptional measures. We are looking ahead. We hope that everything is going to be better. Nevertheless, keeping the connections alive with colleagues, counterparts, and friends remains very important. It was annoying that we had to do it for months just over a Zoom call or a Teams call, but the connection needs to be there.

Nevertheless, we have to build the new normal, to look at how our new working environment would look. It is not going to be the same setup for each one of us. It is going to be different. We have to work together. We have to communicate in order to build it. In the end, we are doing all of this to stay a step ahead, and in the current times, stay safe. Thank you very much, and looking forward to seeing you in person, either in Europe or in the United States. Thank you very much.