Employment and HR: Top Priorities for In-House Teams

In 2025, the interplay of digitalization, regional reorganizations, increased human mobility and an unprecedent number of disciplinary cases will reach a pinnacle massively impacting local workforce. Amidst this unstable political, social and economic climate, the dynamic of the work relations shall confront unprecedented changes. HR specialists and in-house counsels have no option but to stay ahead of the curve to ensure compliance and mitigate legal risks.

Here is a selection of the issues we believe will become top priorities for employment specialists in the coming months:

1. Global and regional restructuring

After the post-pandemic echoes started settling, we see more and more multinational companies adopting new trends on regional clusters, managed by group appointed directors. This usually comes with measures aimed at optimizing local structures, by mirroring them to the central ones, where costs can be controlled with more ease. At group level, companies are increasingly investing in digital technologies to streamline operations, enhance customer experience, and improve efficiency, while integrating artificial intelligence, big data analytics or cloud computing. Investments like this require long-term optimization plans, with direct and immediate impact on the local subsidiaries.

How does this impact on the local workforce? Digital transformation often leads to the reorganization of business processes, by either transforming functions or crucial roles, and/ or by completely disregarding some of them.

What’s to remember? Romanian laws require restrictive conditions under which reorganizations can take place. The underlying business case should go beyond “this is what the group wants” and focus on the exact reasons justifying those measures.

In practice, we do this in two steps: the macro cause, where we identify the financial difficulties, the delta between the expected KPIs and what was reached in the previous year, loss of clients/major projects, reduced workload. Second, we delve into the micro cause, where we explain how cutting a certain position is expected to help the company recover some of the losses or at least head in the right financial direction. For instance, cutting a hierarchical level may bring benefits such as faster decision-making, avoiding redundancies and resources optimization, increased agility and responsiveness to change, simpler, streamlined workflows, and, lastly, this can reduce overhead costs (this should never be the sole reason).

2. Unionization Trends

While many of the trade unions registered in Romania do not meet the conditions to be representative at company level (which would imply gathering at least 35% of the employees in that company), their voice is stronger than ever thanks to the powers granted to them by the new law on social dialogue, to the detriment of the democratically elected employees’ representatives. In other words, in a company of 1000 employees, employees representatives elected by +500 employees need to stay silent and make room for the newly formed unions, even if these would have around 10 employees (which is the minimum legal threshold to register a trade union).

While employers cannot intrude in this election process, employees themselves should stay vigilant when it comes to empowering a certain person to represent them or to negotiate on their behalf.

A transparent, reasonable and mature social dialogue can bring prosperity to any company, and this should be the common aim of both parties. In our experience, some union leaders find it hard to understand that substantial changes in the salary budget risk deviating that company off track and may bring financial difficulties, in the long term, with positions being cut and employees losing their jobs permanently.

Amidst the complicated social and political environment, the rise of unionization efforts and collective bargaining movements oblige companies allocating serious resources (both human and financial) to manage such actions. These trends require proactive legal strategies, key steps including:

• Preparing for potential collective bargaining negotiations with reliable and comprehensive financial data on what can be granted and what cannot (group level statistics can help);
• Ensuring constant communication with the employees, making them aware of the market challenges and company’s financial evolution, to manage expectations timely;
• Social dialogue should be a priority irrespective of whether there are formal employees’ representatives or a trade union or not. Being fair and transparent towards all of the employees should be a priority;
• Timely training HR and leadership teams about union-related legal risks, to avoid hasty measures with irreversible impact.

3. Employee wellbeing – workplace harassment compliance

Employee well-being focus is increasing in the context of anti-harassment initiatives, which remain a priority for the Romanian legislator. Our team keeps our clients well informed of these changes via our monthly newsletter, the Employment Essentials.

Courts can order payment of moral damages especially if companies have stayed passive, taking no or insufficient actions when facing workplace harassment issues. Of course, this implies the victim having raised the issue with the management or the relevant body (usually, HR or legal), but this is not mandatory –there are quite a few companies finding out about the accusations for the first time when being summoned by the court. The victims have 3 years to go to court asking for damages, and they can (and usually, they do) call the potential perpetrator as a defendant as well, which can bring serious risks reputational wise. Also worth mentioning –  the National Council on Fighting Discrimination can order companies to publish its decision on their website, even if that decision is not final (as it can be challenged in court).

In this context, companies must prioritize:

• ensuring compliance with the new rules, updating the Internal Regulations and the Policy on fighting harassment at work;
• implementing and strengthening the anti-harassment policies;
• enforcing the internal reporting channels (more recently, anonymous complaints must be considered and investigated as well);
• put in place specialized training programs – these are the best tool to raise awareness among the employees.

4. Remote work and international mobility

Not less than 37% of workers in the EU started working from home during a lockdown. Nowadays, hybrid and remote work models are still mainstream, but legal complexities persist. Key areas of focus include:

• the need to comply with multi-jurisdictional labor laws for remote employees (as the imperative provisions protecting the employees applicable in their place of work usually apply with priority);
• drafting smart policies on flexible work arrangements, keeping the right dose of discretion to call employees back at work;
• prior assessments of the tax and health and safety issues; or
• addressing cybersecurity risks related to remote work.

5. Other topics of interest:

1. Work-life balance: the right to switch off. In January 2021, the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling on the European Commission to propose a directive on the right to disconnect. The resolution emphasizes the need for EU-wide legislation to protect workers’ rights to disconnect from work-related tasks outside of working hours without facing negative consequences. The Commission launched consultations of social partners on fair telework and the right to disconnect, so this is a topic where we are expecting considerable news in the following year.
2. Increased interest in the whistleblowing cases. As a matter of novelty, last year, several courts suspended (via special procedural mechanism, called presidential ordinance) dismissal decisions of alleged whistleblowers, until the formal challenge against that decision is finalized.
3. Employee monitoring. As workplace surveillance tools increase, so do concerns over data privacy. The amount of the fines applied by the national authority increases year by year, so companies must consider complying with the EU and domestic privacy laws affecting employee data collection. Establishing clear policies on monitoring remote employees and preparing the relevant documents before resorting to monitoring is key to protecting the validity of said evidence and avoid legal risks.

Therefore, 2025 promises to be a pivotal year for employment law, with in-house teams playing a critical role in navigating these challenges. By staying proactive, embracing compliance best practices, and fostering a legally sound workplace culture, organizations can minimize risks while supporting a dynamic and evolving workforce. Law firms should be contacted timely and proactively, as prevention is more effective than any damage control efforts post-factum.

By Ioan Dumitrascu and Cristina Tudoran, Partners, Filip & Company