Ahmet Çetiner

Gür-İş İnşaat ve Mühendislik A.S

1. What is the most challenging thing in company you are working while keeping up with environmental changes?

The most challenging thing is that practice does not always fit the theoretic. For instance, changes is currency. Estimation of inflation was 10-11% but the real inflation is 25% in Turkey. Thus, big companies have difficulties. Also, while doing business in many industry, permission from 5 ministries is needed. For instance, in Hatay all the permissions were taken 9 years ago. After that when the government changed 2 years ago, they wanted to remove the power plants. Finally, the technological changes affect the company. Recently communication channels such as e-mail, internet and smartphones are commonly used, therefore common sense of the work principles ultimately changed. This change led working hours to get extended to 24 hours a day, since there is continuous communication.

2. Big companies like you, whether to choose adapt the environment and getting , or change the environment ?

The number of big companies working in same area is approximately 20-25 in Turkey. All innovations and developments correspondingly continue. There are both examples and details which can be took from each other. Capital, credit, investment choices are generally main line. Therefore, there is no huge difference in these subjects. The main difference occurs in details. The fact that being unable to enter specific areas if employees do not have authorization on the name badge is an example of detail. On the contrary of details, main line both adapts to changes and creates changes.

3. How do you respond to changing office perception? What do you think about flexible working hours ?

We don’t support the home office understanding because we believe that being in the situation itself will hastens the information flow and increase the efficiency. For instance, accounting clerks needs to work collaboratively because every hour changes do happen such as bills are extracted and circulars are published which already in need of processing. Also, with the recent changes in technology pushed us to work 24 hours per day. Mail, internet and smart phones led us to work in cooperation with different companies in different countries that even in weekends and after hours work load is carried on. There may be problems which should be solved or questions which should be asked.

4. What do you do when one of the employees resists the necessary change?

Our employees considers words of our company’s founder as a non-written constitution. Employees take note of his every sentence in their mind. According to philosophy of our founder, the most important person in the company is not himself, every employee is the most important person for company. As a company which has this perspective, all rights that need to be given to employees are uniform and regular. Through this perspective, every decision in company is determined with employees by considering decision’s contribution to company, instead of considering only one person’s interest. This perspective is sensed by employees. Thus, resistance does not occur in company.

5. What was the biggest and most effective change in the industry you’ve ever worked for? How did your company and competing companies react to this change?

The biggest change is the development of technology, which is the biggest difference between the generation of people of my age and the current generation. In 1992, the mobile phone first appeared in Turkey. I bought 5 telephone line from Turkcell in order to make communication more easy. However, we continued to use satellite phone from 1990 to 2000 because of insufficient base station in Turkey. Recent we as both an individual and as a corporate can reach every information and document within few seconds. Thus, every technological change in country is followed and is implemented in country in order to fall behind from environment.

6. Do you find it important to set up teams to respond to changing environment, to keep pace with changes or to provide information flow in creating change?

Since we asked ourselves this question, we do a lot of seminars about the changes in the environment in order to inform our employees. These seminars are generally relevant with accounting, human resources and law. Because of fast changing environment, we know that our company should follow the changes, and also keep pace with these in country and world. In the future projects, if a unit cannot handle the project on its own, it is possible to cooperate with other units. For example, our energy, legal, accounting and human resources department will come together to determine where the work takes place and how. Their pre-determination allows us to save time.