Atlas Copco Turkey Speeds up Efforts on Gender Diversity

Atlas Copco Group mainly targets to create a common understanding of how to attract, recruit, develop and retain female employees, and of the vital importance of diversity in management.

Recognizing the need to develop more female managers, the first high-level female mentorship program -Pleiades- was launched. Diversity in top management was the motivation behind creation of the Female Mentorship Program, a program that pairs high-potential women with male mentors in general manager positions, to help the mentees prepare for such positions.

Pleiades promises to support, encourage women to grow within Atlas Copco and offers successful, skilled, committed and highly motivated women interaction across functional, divisional and geographic boundaries. This kind of interaction for sure brings  many benefits like; motivation and inspiration, a greater understanding of Group operations, more  awareness of opportunities for new challenges and professional development.

In order to walk the talk and as in many respects Professional Women Network fits very well to Atlas Copco’s approach to women career and gender diversity, Atlas Copco Turkey is a corporate member of PWN, İstanbul. PWN believes that gender balanced decision making creates strength of character, resilience and growth, and therefore aims to advance women in leadership and provides a cross-sectoral networking and training platform for professional women. PWN impacts the community by sharing knowledge, best practices, tools and techniques through mentoring, events and programs.

Atlas Copco’s female employees join the monthly seminars of PWN; meet the other members of the network, enjoy the interaction and learn from the high level speakers.

During 2016, Atlas Copco Turkey is planning to be actively working with PWN Workshops like mentor –mentee program, which is already launched and from Atlas Copco Turkey, two mentors are assigned for being mentors for two ladies during the year. Atlas Copco employees will also support PWN on the CSR projects for 2016.

Learn more about Atlas Copco’s women’s network at https://www.facebook.com/FemaleBusinessNetwork ​

“Equality, fairness, and diversity are fundamental pillars of Atlas Copco’s people management process. As Holding managers, our main task is to walk the talk and spread the Group vision in the regions we take care of. Our co-operation with PWN started in 2015 and obviously it was the right move to make in order to emphasize and support Atlas Copco’s approach to female employees.”says Ronny Onkelinx, VP Holding, “Receiving positive feed back on this initiative keeps us more and more motivated and willing to do the best for female employees and being chosen as one of the mentors of PWN, I am personally very happy to serve this cause.”  

Damla Özten, MR & CR Human Resources Specialist
“Feminen Leadership is the name of the event which i joined. Feminen Leadership is the most favorite concept recently.  It is about how a women can take place in all areas of the life as a woman in a feminine way, not in masculine way. Being a woman is something emotional, intuitive and business life needs women leaders who are aware of their femininity.”

Saim Bahadır Ergener, RDT Business Line Manager
“I participated “Engaging Man” workshop together with 13 different male employees from different companies. Most of them were HR Managers and Senior Managers from big companies, who are working with female employees. The main idea of the workshop was to discuss how men  can have a better effect on the development of women career, both in Business and Social life. Most of the participants were discussing the diffrent ways to act as better spouses/fathers/friends and managers. HR Director of Baxter made an opening speach, talked about the statistics, number of women working&unemployed in our community. Generally speaking, it was very good to discuss on how we can effect  the women’s life & career, which starts from our family & friends. "

"First Impression", the CSR project of PWN İstanbul for 2015 was initiated and run targeting the fresh graduates and provided a guidance to the new graduate ladies on the job interviews, creating a first impression during the interviews and their first workplaces aswell.

During 2015, PWN İstanbul and the corporate partners worked hard on the project and finally on November 23rd, a big event in Marmara University was organised to gather all fresh graduate ladies. A seminar on "how to create a first impression with our look and behaviour during the interviews and at our workplace", followed by a "shopping mall" experience was really fun to be a part of.

The big seminar hall was converted into a big gardrobe, and the students were so happy while chosing the business clothes that were collected for them.

Duygu Evrankaya, MR Communication Professional
"Seminar was fruitful, fun and most important, it was open to lots of interaction among the fresh graduates and the women leaders of PWN, who had very successful careers in different companies.”

Ayşen Uzcan, MR Business Controller
“It was a really unique experience."

The guest speaker was a billiant woman with a very prestigious history and a great role model as a woman image. Overall, I think this is a very successful initiative how Atlas Copco contributes to women networking, at the same time supports an NGO via women in a geography in Turkey.

Besides there are a lot of learning in each month’s seminar and workshop activities. I hope Holding keeps providing the sponsorship and we’ll have more participants from different BAs in coming months.”

Dilek Armutlu, Spare Parts and Service Administrator
"It was great to learn something about image in business life and community. I learnt useful tips and beneficial ideas to improve myself."