| Metin Sancak – Board Member and General Manager @ Folkart İnşaat |
The world is now turning in a different direction. This is not a geographic statement, of course. Business life and its needs are changing, new developments emerge every day, and expectations in business are shifting. This is true not only for managers but also for employees. Digital transformation, Industry 4.0 and Generations Y and Z are adding new meaning to our working lives and will continue to do so.
We are living through a change that, like the invention of the printing press in its time, is turning the world in a different direction. Perhaps a century from now, future generations will describe the change we are experiencing today as a revolution of its own and will research and interpret it.I cannot know the future, but to be useful to our own time, I wanted to share our experiences of this change at Folkart with all business people, so that, in keeping with the spirit of the times, we multiply knowledge by sharing it.
EFFICIENCY and COORDINATION
Today, many things, technology above all, are evolving at a pace that is hard to keep up with. Everyone has a lot to do but almost no time. Using time efficiently, keeping up with the competition and even getting ahead of it, growing, learning, and reaching our targets efficiently while doing all of this are undoubtedly among the things we all hope for and work hardest at.
In our organizations, every individual's calendar is fully booked, often reserved weeks in advance. As individuals and as departments, we work in an orderly and efficient way, make plans and manage our priorities well. But we also know very well that good, value-adding work only comes from "team effort". Especially in today's fast-paced business life, which is highly volatile and complex and requires us to watch the competition constantly, situations that demand collaboration require us to develop and manage not only our personal growth but also our ability to grow as a team and act together.
"Synchronization and Collaboration"
Planning, execution and evaluation: every piece of work needs serious involvement and support from other work. This makes synchronization between individuals and departments essential. The concept and culture of coordination express exactly this kind of collaboration.
Factors such as departments, units and employees staying out of sync and frequent communication breakdowns prevent this collaboration from achieving its purpose, causing many tasks to move forward independently and without awareness of each other. As a result, problems arise such as failing to take precautions in time, failing to learn from experience and the inefficiency of trying to reinvent the wheel.
Ultimately, risks emerge such as rising inefficiency and error rates, a failure to build organizational learning capability, and falling short of becoming a learning organization.
At Folkart, we put key words and philosophies such as being a team, unity of direction and working toward the same goal at the forefront, and took as our guide the key words "EFFICIENCY through COORDINATION", which we believe express all of them together in the best way. In a changing world, this is now an inevitable method and must be a very important step for growth. Together with our team, we created a theme for the year that puts efficiency at the forefront as we move with firmer steps toward our corporate vision: "to become the leader and most preferred brand in the industry by 2025."
At this point, we declared 2018 the "Year of Coordination and Efficiency" and set out on a journey to improve, through this theme, the areas we felt were lacking in line with our vision and strategic goals.
"Technology Investments Alone Are Not Enough"
As I have mentioned before on this network, over the last 3 years we as an organization have made very significant technology investments and transformations (you can read my previous article on this topic here). Thanks to these investments, we strengthened the way we work in many areas and significantly increased our efficiency. But as we said at the beginning, to compete and keep up with today's conditions, or even get a few steps ahead, technology investments alone are not enough. What really matters is putting efficiency and coordination at the center and using all these investments as effectively as possible.
We know that for a chain to become stronger than it is today, every link must become at least as strong as the links before and after it. The way to achieve this is to spread an approach of continuous monitoring and continuous improvement across the entire organization.
We see the importance of internal communication, horizontal relationships, everyone's ability to reach one another easily, and our ability to discuss and make joint decisions as the biggest advantages in realizing the coordination theme. At Folkart, we always make use of this advantage and continually see its positive effects.
An indispensable part of a changing world
Our employees, our most important asset, do not act only within their own job descriptions. By taking part in various committees, working groups and project teams, they give us a significant advantage in securing the success of projects and play a major role in our coordination goal driving efficiency. This is an indispensable part of a changing world.
In line with our goals and vision, we are working to bring our business partners and other external stakeholders further into the game so that our motivation to succeed extends to them and they become part of this culture. In this way, we position the source of organizational learning not only in our employees, partners and consultants but in every individual we interact with and who interacts with us.
As of this year, in line with this theme, we launched a serious, company-wide effort to review and streamline all our company processes and make them efficiency-focused. In parallel, we are thoroughly and comprehensively revisiting critical topics such as our performance system, our models for identifying areas for improvement, our risk approaches, our risk management framework and the improvement of areas open to development. We are renewing our existing policies to serve this goal and striving to develop a serious model of our own rather than relying on theory.
In short, we aimed to link change, competition, new customer demands, market conditions and our corporate goals to our coordination and efficiency theme in a way that most effectively includes our employees, shareholders, customers, business partners and the public, toward whom we always feel responsible. With this in mind, we focused on our human resources policies, communication policies, the development of our corporate reflexes, our ability to make joint decisions, organizational learning and development, alignment and togetherness, ensuring unity of direction, coordination between units and roles, and the progress of all of these. With this focus, we began taking steps to update and strengthen the steps that link our trackable performance management strategic goals to one another. Along the lines of all these policies, and in keeping with this year's theme, we aim to improve, renew and take the big steps of the coming years on these foundations.
As I said at the beginning, at a time when the world is starting to turn in a different direction, technology can only be a tool that makes people's work easier; it cannot be an end in itself. With an understanding of coordination and efficiency, your organization's success, especially at a time when a new generation of teammates is entering business life, will only be possible through the investment you make in people and the value you add to them.
With my best wishes that our country's business community, without missing the spirit of the times, does not fall behind in this great transformation taking place around the world…
Sources
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/process-optimization
https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-employees-work-from-home
https://hbr.org/2014/12/getting-virtual-teams-right
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