A Turkish Workforce

I first moved to Turkey in the early part of the 1990’s to help start a medium sized joint venture factory for a large multi-national company.  I was part of a team of executives imported from various countries and our task was to set up operations to produce in Turkey the same manufactured product we made in other factories.  Prior to coming we had spent a week as a team in a cross-cultural training program that was designed to prepare us for the different way things would work in Turkey.  The program helped, but it only scratched the surface.  The real learning was all on the job.

After a couple of years of operation as I was talking with some of the other foreign managers we got into a discussion of the merits of our employees and compared them with the work crews we had before.  It shocked all of us to learn that unanimously we preferred our Turkish staff.  They were easier to work with, more cooperative, more positive and better trained than our staffs back home (being a multi-national corporation, “home” included the U.K., U.S., Belgium, Germany & Hong Kong.)  We all had our complaints as well and there were clearly issues we were each working through.  But at the bottom line each of us felt the Turkish workforce was a very pleasant surprise.

This isn’t everybody’s experience.  We were blessed to be a high visibility operation with a big budget.  The success of our project was closely tied to product quality and before starting up we had been terrified of Turkish quality standards so consequently the company paid well, selected employees with rigorous care and provided excellent training.  We still ended up with a much lower cost base than we had in our European or North American operations and achieved generally a higher quality output.

One of the big plusses was that we could afford to hire engineers from some of the best schools in the country for jobs that back home would have been performed by technicians.  Turkey produces a lot of well trained engineers with good technical skills, but doesn’t really have the economic strength to employ them all.  Consequently, it’s economically reasonable to employ engineers for more jobs than we could in Europe or North America. 

Another great discovery was the sense of loyalty.  We didn’t understand the paternalistic nature of Turkish society at the time, but we benefited from it.  Our employees felt their department was their clan and were fiercely loyal.  They would do anything if they really believed the boss wanted them to.  My secretary once explained to me that she could get anyone in the company to do anything if she said “Robert Bey is angry.”  Back home that would have meant nothing.  It gave me a feeling of power that was new and a little bit scary.  I had to be careful not to abuse it, but it did help in an emergency or two.

We also discovered a number of problems that we shared in our discussion that day.  The biggest complaints dealt with initiative, creativity and critical thinking.  These are natural consequences of the way the education system has traditionally worked in Turkey – students are taught to memorize the right answers to problems, never to question their teacher and are not encouraged to ask “why?”  This makes for obedient but complacent employees.  It makes for good technicians, but mediocre engineers.  I have been repeatedly frustrated by employees who would eagerly do any task I gave them, but refused to take on a broad responsibility.  (I’ll come back to this in future postings.)

The loyalty also had a down side.  The first time the managers met to address salary increases (back when inflation was more than 60% per year this was a constant discussion.)  I went through that meeting as I had always done, looking at our place in the market and the relative position of our employees, comparing performance with current salary and worked with the other managers to make an equitable distribution of the available increase funds.  My employees were furious!  They had expected me to beat down the other managers and bring home a bigger share of the salary budget for my clan, my tribe.  It seems they identified themselves as a team in very competitive terms against the other departments and by looking to “the big picture” I had, in their eyes, not done my job.  They judged me on my ability to get more budget money for our department than the other department managers.

These are just a few of the joys and struggles I faced as a young foreign manager in a Turkish joint venture.  My experiences in a smaller, less well funded operation were similar and reinforced for me some of the understanding I’ve developed of the psychology of employees here.  The conclusions remain pretty much the same – a good Turkish workforce is a great competitive strength.  But I now understand better how important it is that the workforce be properly managed.  Most western bosses misread their employees’ motivations and desires.  The secret is to understand what they are thinking, why they are doing what they’re doing and what they really want, which is often quite different from what they say they want.  Get those things straight, and Turkey can be a great place for a factory!   Get them wrong and it can be an expensive and painful time.