As you said, we have a lot of tools and we have access to artificial intelligence that helps us evaluate situations much better and much more effectively. We do employee surveys where we ask employees how well they know the processes, how the changes affect their work, whether they are satisfied or how they feel. But almost every large company does this to find out how they can develop as an organisation, what they could improve.
In the past year, however, we've increased the frequency of these surveys and we don't just do the big ones but also smaller follow-up surveys from time to time, where we really find out how people feel, what they need. And we can afford to do them frequently because we have processes that analyse the data much faster, of course. What's even better is that we can analyse not only in a one-to-ten style, but also through comments that people make based on, let's say, keywords.
The tools can also analyse employee sentiment in a much better way, and that really gives us a better insight into how people genuinely feel, how they perceive the current work situation, and how we can continue improving as a company and improve the employee experience as well, without employees having to tell us directly. Because sometimes, until they tell us directly what they're not happy with, they're already very frustrated.
Yes, I haven't worked in HR my entire career, but my assessment would be that HR has always been there when I needed it. When I joined, we had just built our then so-called HR shared services centre in Prague, where we concentrated highly administrative processes across Europe. We took the first step towards having HR business partners who would be much more strategic supporters of the business.
Over time, and of course technology has also enabled this, we have brought in much more standardised services such as consulting, and now we also provide services remotely via video and chat. I'm currently the HR Director for Central and Eastern Europe and, in a conversation with the Managing Director of our Market Unit when I joined, I told him I didn't want to be the kind of person who would just execute decisions that were made, but that I wanted to be involved in those decisions and be part of the discussions around them. And I believe that is accepted today.
HR at SAP has made a really big step in managing the organisation along with those in sales and other functions. Therefore, people like me needn't burden ourselves with worrying about administrative processes and so on because we can access data from any device.
This means that when we sit in a meeting and focus at once on topics that I would otherwise say I'd produce a report on and present in two weeks, I can now open the data immediately and get an up-to-date overview.
That's definitely where technology has helped HR grow and become much more professional. We are no longer working on a general level, but really as strategic partners talking about trends in HR that we would like to implement. I think that's been a huge shift in our field over the last 15 years.
When we asked employees how they would like to work in a post-pandemic situation, we found that they don't see it as completely home office, but also not 100% works office, so it's more of a hybrid model. People would like to be flexible and they'd like to choose, but they still miss the social factor in this home office era, the interaction with colleagues, meeting for coffee and talking without having to schedule it and looking at each other through screens.
We're moving towards some hybrid world where we enable a flexible working model wherever possible. We have learned that we often have to intensely work with employment law. I believe we will see changes on the government side as well because they have realised during the pandemic that change is needed also on this level. But certainly our goal is to allow employees to work in the way that is best for them, to thrive and be as creative as possible. I'm sure in the development area at SAP, where colleagues rely on lively teamwork, people will work from the office a little more than those in sales. They have always been with customers anyway and were or are used to working in a more remote mode.
But I think we'll be somewhere in the middle. Two or three days in the office and the remaining days on home office. From an employer's point of view, we would certainly like to enable this in accordance with local labour law and regulations in the country concerned.