We’re hiring where YOU are!    

Great salary packages? A private medical insurance that also covers dental health? How about sports membership, telephone allowances, private pension plans and Christmas and Easter allowances? What would you like to get alongside your future job?

Read the whole Undelucram interview with three 8x8 team members and discover the full list of employee benefits that await you at 8x8. But first…

Why Remote Works for Us

The Covid-19 pandemic has undoubtedly put pressure on many workforces and businesses across the globe, speeding up digital transformation and reshaping the world of work. For 8x8, a leading business communications provider, the past two years have been a time of learning, growing, and adapting. We feel grateful that this has also been a time of unprecedented growth for us, especially our team in Romania. We were rated Top 5 IT&C company to work for in Romania in 2022 on Undelucram.ro, and we’re always striving to improve, especially as our team continues to grow.

To learn more about 8x8 in Romania, I sat down with three 8x8 team members to ask them about what the transition to the remote work environment has been like for the business, how 8x8 employees have adapted to the work from home setup, and what might be in store for the fast-growing company.

On remote team culture

Jamie, how would you describe 8x8’s company culture?

The company really has this wonderful, entrepreneurial, can-do attitude about it. It’s a result of the cultural aspects that shape what we are and inform the technology that we’re producing. We have a very collaborative style of working that permeates its way all through the organization. There’s an attitude here around trying to help each other that was here from the start and it’s followed us through as we’ve grown. We have an open-door policy, we’re not too hung up on roles and titles, and have that flat mentality. That makes 8x8 a very welcoming environment, which I think brings out the best in people. This cultural aspect, along with the wonderful tech that we’ve got, has certainly helped us in the context of working remotely.

“Do we get it right all the time? Of course we don’t. But it’s our attitude that makes us who we are and shapes our success.”

Jamie Snaddon, VP, General Counsel & Managing Director for EMEA

Speaking of success, how do you define and celebrate success in your organization?

Success can take many shapes. We obviously have our economic success, and that drives us, but the economic success is a result, it’s something you get because of everything else that is successful in your organization.

Secondly, an employee’s personal success is important and feeds into the company’s success. There are numerous levels in which we celebrate our employees’ success and we have various initiatives to reward employee and team achievements. Beyond that, are you seeing people engaging in exciting work, are they growing, are they moving up in the organization? That’s quite important to us at 8x8 and something we’re trying to promote more and more. We value our employees’ ability to not only go through a promotion line, but move throughout the organization, and we have a lot of who we call “movers and shakers” of the company, who move to another role, another part of the company, or even another country.

You’re based out of London, and as EMEA Managing Director you have one foot in the UK, one in Romania. How do you stay connected with the growing team in Romania?

When I joined 8x8, you could count the number of Romanian employees on one hand. Fast forward 5 years you’ve got 400+ and growing. It’s fantastic. Our Romania office is one of the jewels in the crown. It’s a great office, a great environment, and our Romanian staff really do epitomize what’s great about 8x8.

From a managing perspective, being able to keep that “one foot in” has been challenging, especially with COVID. Before, I would be traveling there periodically, spending time in the office, spending time with individuals, and learning what’s happening at the ground level. With COVID obviously that’s much more challenging, so we have to manage that with our technology. I still try to come out when I can and we have key members of the Romania business sit on the European leadership team who I liaise with regularly. We value our cultural diversity and one of the more recent All Hands meetings we had was timed to be around the Romanian national holiday. We had guest speakers that worked in a variety of roles in Romania who came on and talked about what they were doing, and I think this format helps us achieve that inclusion at a regional level.

On the experience of remote work

Alexandra, I’m sure there are many challenges to working with a remote team. What changes have you implemented to stay connected and enhance the employee experience?

One of the first things we did was to develop different types of training under the Work Great @ Home program, which we implemented very early on in the pandemic to continue supporting the wellbeing of our employees. A key pillar of this program are the virtual ergonomic evaluations that our Facilities team run, which focus on the importance of having an ergonomic work environment and helping employees achieve that in their homes by recommending specialized equipment that we hand out to make sure they have everything they need to make their work environment comfortable and safe, from an ergonomic standpoint.

Then, in early 2021, after one year of working fully remotely we launched our Rejuven8 program, whereby we observe a company-wide, global wellness day off every quarter, just to unplug, take a break from the online, from virtual meetings, and recharge.

For Romania specifically, one big change we implemented, also in 2021, was the advanced electronic signature with our partners at DocuSign. This was a huge achievement and brought us tons of benefits, especially as our team is now distributed across Romania. It’s a really efficient way of managing employee paperwork, it’s friendlier towards the environment, and it’s part of keeping up with modern technology.

You mentioned that now you’re hiring people from all across Romania. What are some of the main ways that you attract and retain talent at 8x8?

We strive to do that at various levels. First off, from a compensation point of view, we offer attractive salary packages alongside best-in-class benefits, including private medical insurance that also covers dental, sport subscriptions, telephone allowances, private pension plan, Christmas and Easter allowances, and many other incentives. On top of all that, we have performance bonuses in place and, something that we believe is quite unique, we offer employee stock packages (RSUs), which means that all of our employees are actually shareholders and part of the overall company performance from their first day at 8x8.

Something new that we introduced last December specifically for Romania is to honor all public holidays that fall on a Sunday or Saturday by observing those on a weekday, either Friday or Monday. This, again, is something that’s not very customary in Romania, as it’s not regulated from a legislative perspective like it is in other countries, such as the UK or the US, but it’s important to us as a company.

Are you still working remotely? What are the plans for the Romania office moving forward?

Yes, we are still working remotely. All our Romania staff are teleworkers, but we do have the physical office open in Cluj for the employees if they wish to work from the office. However, we find that people got used to working from home, and very few of them prefer to work from the office regularly. Our employees were very fast to adapt to the home office environment and we saw our productivity actually increase. This prompted us to expand all our Romania hiring at national level and we now have many colleagues based out of different cities.

On remote hiring

What career opportunities can one expect to find at 8x8 and how do you currently run interviews?

We’re currently interviewing remotely, which is great because as a business communications company, we get to use our own tech to conduct those interviews. Candidates get a glimpse of our product, what we do, and the impact they can make here. We entered 2022 strong with 40 open jobs in Romania with 80% of them being in our Engineering organization. As a full-cycle product development company, we take care of our product from start to finish. We expect 2022 will bring more openings in Engineering, which is our focus, but we’re also growing in other business areas.

Last year we also ran a fully virtual Internship program and had 19 interns who spent their summer with us, working in Engineering, Technical Support, HR, and Finance. We had the opportunity to meet some incredible young minds, and we’re happy to have had 12 of them join us for the long run. We’re now preparing for the 2022 Internship program that’s coming up in the summer and look forward to welcoming the next generation of interns at 8x8 in Romania.

What does the next chapter in 8x8’s Romania growth story look like? What’s in store for 2022?

Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve grown by around 200 employees in Romania. We’ve just recently hit the 400-employee milestone and moving forward our goal is to reach 1,000 employees in Romania in the next few years. As of last year, we started recruiting across Romania, which proved very successful, and we definitely want to continue on this path as we continue to expand the business. Our Engineering team is still the main focus for us, and we’re looking forward to bringing in more and more people who want to make an impact, who are curious and eager to bring their drive to the table to help us further consolidate our tech and power a connected world.

We are hiring where YOU are. Check out our career page. Get in touch with us at ro-talentacquisition@8x8.com.