We Seeked Inspiration at the Plantyst Conference

This was the title of this year's conference "Day full of inspiration" which the company Plantyst organizes for the fourth time in the Prague residence of Microsoft. Colognia was a proud partner of this event.

This year the Plantyst colleagues have chosen a blue banana for their introdution picture - it stands for the incoherent corridor of urbanization and the main European nuclear space in western Europe. It starts in the North at north-western Great Britain and covers Benelux countries, north of France, western and south-western Germany, Switzerland up to Milano in nothern Italy in the South. In the curve of this corridor (thus the nick-name "banana") you see cities like London, Brusseles, Amsterdam, Cologne/R, Frankfurt/M, Zurich and Milano and they represent one of the most dense concentration of population, finance and industry (source Wikipedia). In Colognia we decided to create blue bananas - we simply manufactured blue shrink sleeve packagings which were put on bananas. You can judge the result yourself on the pictures.

The vice president of Confederation of Industry of the Czech Republic Radek Spicar moderated this conference and he had one of the key notes on Consequences of Cheap Economy for the future of Czech industry. Petr Kadlec made a start with an introduction and he caught everybody's attention on how to convince people to start a journey to a common goal, and this from the perspective of neuroscience. This lecture showed that the main instrument to get people engaged is COMMUNICATION and that one of the many solutions how to move on is to make one step beyond our comfort zone and to make another one and a third one etc. Everybody shall have the possibility to learn, to educate himself or herself, he or she needs answers to questions like What, Why and How.

Then Leos Jirele continued, being chairman of the Board of Directors at Solea employing 132 persons and of them 70% are handicapped in some way Leos said in the most humble way that this change was induced by a very simple fact that we spend one third of our life at work and thus we should not just perform our tasks at work but enjoy working. Leos introduced many measures to improve his company's culture, eg. voting on his company's topics, discussions, regular monthly meetings of all employees which they wrap up with a positive statement, shopping of healthy food at their company's site and supporting zero waste approach. At the company Solea they introduced a monthly profit share for individuals and there Planstyst and online production monitoring comes handy. They organize a range of events together - team buildings, volunteers' days, rituals like introduction of a new coworder, singing of carols and switching on Christmas tree lights etc. And the result? Zero fluctuation among staff and this company doesn't pay the best wages in the area at all. Congratulations, Leos.

Other speakers were not less interesting - eg. the production manager of the company Purgina Bohus Kokumberg spoke about his success of engaging employees and loyality ratio of happy customers and mentioned also courage many times which made it all happen. Thanks to visionary note of Microsoft speaker Nikola Plasek we found out that Colognia was the only company in the audience at which every employee, blue collar workers included, has got an e-mail address. We also heard that digital transformation is about speed and agility. And sometimes faster is better than perfect.

Thank you, Plantyst, for this invitation. We went home with a luggage full of ideas and inspiration. This is such a great way of meeting our expectations.