An insider blog at Magyar Telekom

The Chief Human Resources Officer of Magyar Telekom, Éva Somorjai.

Jun 05, 2012

Communication can sometimes be a challenge, even for a telecommunications company. At Magyar Telekom, a blog is helping improve the dialogue between management and employees.

Managers can sometimes seem distant and unreachable for employees. It’s a perception Magyar Telekom Chief Human Resources Officer Éva Somorjai wanted to change. So she launched a blog where she could share her thoughts on the great experience she is having at the Hungarian unit of the Deutsche Telekom Group. The blog not only offers employees a direct line to the executive, but also a place to add their own reactions, opinions and ideas – even anonymously.

The blog is part of a new five-year People Strategy developed in 2011 which has also been one of the blog’s main topics. Ms. Somorjai’s writing has become so popular – statistics show that about 70% of employees read the blog – that Chief Sales and Services Officer Attila Keszég is also planning to start blogging.

What’s a typical blog post like? We’re glad you asked.

Read an extract from the blog.

The jaguar, the monkey and the ant

Our school textbooks gave us all kinds of examples of how the food chain works, and one of them was about the ant-eater monkey and the monkey-eater jaguar, which is quite a strange example to provide to kids, but never mind.

I started thinking how this all translates into a workplace hierarchy, and why does everyone (with a few exceptions) want to become a jaguar rather than for example an ant. Discussing this issue with a friend, we figured out the following:

The overwhelming media presence creates a perception that ants and monkeys are worth nothing, while jaguars have everything.
If I cannot be a jaguar, I should be a monkey and thus superior compared to at least the ant.
If we were really aware of our skills and capabilities, most of us could be happy as ants, monkeys or jaguars, alike.
We do not see too many happy jaguars, monkeys or ants, since everyone seems to want to be something else than what he/she is capable of being.
Many monkeys run around wearing jaguar masks and even more ants show themselves off as monkeys, but there is no demand for ant costumes.
Are there happy people at all? And, of course, the eternal question is what happiness means to you or someone else.

That is how far we got and it would be interesting to go on with this line of thinking, though I don’t know whether we, in our civilized society, will ever be as happy as our ancestors who lived their lives hunting, gathering and not needing any masks. They certainly had jaguars among them, who had no idea what they were.