When It Is Fall, Pleaides Start To Meet Again
After a short break to Pleaides activities due to summer holidays, Atlas Copco Turkey women employees and Professional Women Network met for September activity which hosted Erdem Aksakal, a white collar/writer, as the speaker.
Just like in his books; during the seminar, Erdem had an ironic approach to business life we are trying to survive in, and without any doubt he was a great speaker that could easily turn a seminar into a stand up show. Top topic discussed was the popular concept of recent years –family like work environment, sincerity and honesty in business life.
“We are a big family, we treat each other like family.” We hear words like these frequently in business life, but do we really mean it or what do we do particularly to establish a family approach to business that emphasizes trust, values and thus build high-performance teams?
“Sometimes companies and leaders start to accept negative workplace culture as normal, they just do not care about being a good employer and demonstrate healthy leadership but eventually the workplace emerges to be the breeding ground for discontent, boredom, back biting, and complaining.” says Erdem Aksakal, “It is more important than ever for companies to have happy and productive employees. But keeping employees happy in any economy is hard work. Why? Because happiness is, primarily, an inside job, comes from within a person. However; friends, family and employment can add to or detract from someone’s happiness level. So if the workplace is stressful, employees’ production goes down not only in business life but in social and private life.”
It is obvious and a proven fact that only ethical, authentic leaders can succeed in establishing and maintaining strong company cultures by treating the company as an extended family. Because as leaders they know, the more sense of “family” they can create, the more productive people will be.
“As an employer, you have an excellent opportunity to make a difference in your employees’ lives. This may mean a smile, asking how their family is, or asking about their interests or problems. We need to care about each other to get the best results.” says Erdem Aksakal, “Repeating the same words like “we are a family, we are friends, we care…etc” mean nothing if the only thing you understand from being a good employer is allowing your employees to wear Hawaiian shirts on Fridays. Sad but true, you need to put more effort for a real family like work environment.”
While ending his speech -we call it more a stand up show as mentioned in the beginning- Erdem had a suggestion for all future white-collars: please do not stay at “White”, color your collar with various colors, especially with your own.”
