People and Performance award entry
As the Turkcell Team, we understand that in order to create great customer satisfaction, we first need to create an improved employee experience.
Our employees felt that they weren’t able to feel the presence of top management and leadership team in their daily work lives and most of them didn’t even see them in real life. They also felt that there was a distance between top management and they were disconnected. Employees feel that they want more engaging leaders and managers who will listen to their problems, performance related issues and even appreciate them on achievements. Our people always wonder what the top management is up to and what kind of mindset they have so they can align themselves. Since we are a very big company, it is hard for our management team to touch on every person and only time they can get to meet them is on quarterly results meetings. One problem is that it is only one-way communication and there is no engagement. Overall, our problem is top management team does not have a chance to engage with employees and get connected and this makes our employees unhappy and disconnected to the company. Our Employee Satisfaction Surveys conducted in 2016 also pointed our directly to problems on this issue because they didn’t feel the presence of our top management and felt disconnected.
We believe that the top management of a company leads by example and affects the motivation felt by the employees. A management team that takes a sincere interest and connects with the staff is more likely to inspire the employees to achieve.
Whilst the characteristics of substandard managers can be wide-ranging, from poor communication to lack of integrity or courage, the effects of these can be extremely damaging to morale and productivity. In fact, poor management not only affects employee productivity but can also have indirect consequences for workplace innovation and the ability to adapt to changing business conditions. That’s why we needed to come up with an idea to promote engagement and bring both parties closer. We don’t have a big budget for events and we needed something so small that will make a big difference because our employees feel that small gestures have more meaning if it is done from the bottom of our hearts. We organized three different organizations which are;
- ‘’Friday Morning Breakfast’’
- ‘’December 21st The Longest Night’’ event
- ‘Finance works overtime every day but not today event’’.
So we organized a morning breakfast at our headquarters and all locations in Turkey on a Friday morning.
Normally, we get free breakfast on Friday’s and it is no surprise for anyone but this time our management team was there in all our 11 locations to actually serve the breakfast and famous Turkish bakery. Our employees were so shocked to see our CEO wearing kitchen coveralls and a hat and serving fresh donuts, bagels and saying ”Good morning and enjoy it”. People started taking photos with them and some of them had joys of tears because this not a common thing in our company. Our other C-level leaders also served breakfast in other headquarters and enjoyed chatting with our employees. Our network operations team works midnight to morning and they don’t get to see management any time so we planned a surprise visit to network headquarters on December 21st, the longest night. When they saw our C-Level bringing in food carts, hot dogs, desserts and other treats, employees started applauding and were very surprised by it. Our last event was for our accounting and finance team because they are very busy at the end of every month because of closings and other operations and they need a big motivation. So our c-level visited them with food carts and lots of treats once more and this time we had our Turkcell Music band to enhance the meeting.
Overall, it was a small idea with a big impact on motivation, engagement and connecting with our employees. The biggest obstacle that we had was it was very hard to convince our top management team to serve our employees. They didn’t want to commit their time or didn’t have time to do these and in Turkish culture, it is normal for top management to keep a distance with employees. So we had to convince them that it will be a big motivating factor and connecting with people will pay at the end. The greatest impact was people sent hundreds of emails to our mailbox saying thank you because they have a new perspective on our leaders. Our annual employee satisfaction survey results went up by 5 scores to 81 points compared last year. Our C-levels now adapt ‘servant leadership model’ because they get to see our performance levels went up after this surprise visits and employees actually talk to them directly on problems and improvements and for Turkcell leaders, it became clear that they listen to what employees have to say. And surprisingly enough, our turn over rates in departments that we conducted these surprise events dropped to levels never achieved before. We also reached our targets in “First Year” Turnover figures: While 2016 regretted turnover resulted in 11.7%, 2017 regretted turnover is 9.2%.
[pdf-embedder url=”https://thepeerawards.com/wp-content/uploads/formidable/198/Surprise-entry.pdf”]
Our annual employee satisfaction survey results went up by 5 scores to 81 points compared last year. Our C-levels now adapt ‘servant leadership model’ because they get to see our performance levels went up after this surprise visits and employees actually talk to them directly on problems and improvements and for Turkcell leaders it became clear that they listen to what employees has to say. And surprisingly enough, our turn over rates in departments that we conducted this surprise events dropped to levels never achieved before. We also reached our targets in “First Year” Turnover figures: While 2016 regretted turnover resulted in 11.7%, 2017 regretted turnover is 9.2%.
We chose specials days to make our events more fun such as December 21st, the longest day and end of the month for Finance and Accounting because they are very busy at the end of the month. For us, innovation is not creating something new but seeing something in front of you while others don’t recognize it.
Our employees felt that they weren’t able feel the presence of top management and leadership team in their daily work lives and most of them didn’t even see them in real life. They also felt that there was a distance between top management and they were disconnected. Employees feel that they want more engaging leaders and management who will listen to their problems, performance related issues and even appreciate them on achievements. Our people always wonder what the top management is up to and what kind of mindset they have so they can align themselves. Since we are a very big company, it is hard for our management team to touch on every person and only time they can get to meet them is on quarterly results meetings. So our inspiration comes from a need to connect our employees with top management because there is a need. We as a team watch CEO’s like Richard Branson and one thing who does so well is he is present in his employees daily working lives. He makes surprise visits and for us this was the inspritation. To touch on our employees lives and surprise them.