Community workshop: empowering women at work

Valeriana women excited for the workshop

Last Thursday, Valeriana organised a workshop evening for our team of employees. The theme? “Empowering women at work”. Anne Marie Schulte, career coach and founder of Impact Vision, created a programme based on our theme. More specifically, the workshop focused on authenticity and confidence, overcoming intercultural challenges and how to successfully communicate one’s needs and limits at the workplace. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Yes, we thought so, too… :)

Anne Marie became aware of Valeriana last summer and was really impressed with our work. Impact likes impact! :) She had been working as a solicitor for some time until she decided to go in a new direction. Since then, she has been self-employed as a career coach, supporting business professionals in management and leadership positions to reach their full potential and generate even greater impact. Our employee workshop had the same goal, which is why Anne Marie tailored it to our team’s individual work needs.

Everyone’s sitting together in excitement, the projector is running, drinks and snacks and have been served — let’s go! After a brief round of introductions, Anne Marie delves in the big and somewhat abstract topic of “confidence” — an issue that is relevant to all of us and accompanies us our whole life. Precisely because it is such a big topic that raises many questions that aren’t always easy to answer and understand when German isn’t your first language, we have asked Adelaide, the 15-year-old daughter of Selemawit, one of our employees, to interpret. She translated some of the more difficult questions, making sure that everyone understood what was being said and that there were no big question marks.

Did you know that confidence is made up of three elements? No? Neither did we! It consists of one’s unique identity, one’s self-worth and realistic level of self-confidence. The latter means that you are aware of your own strengths and weaknesses. In this context, Anne Marie also spoke to the Valerianas about differences between Switzerland and their respective home countries.

The Valerianas agreed on one point in particular when it came to cultural differences, namely the topic of equality. They all appreciate the equality of the sexes and the distribution of rules within Swiss families. In their home countries, women are usually responsible for their families and rarely work. That is why they find it so great that women in Switzerland go to work and have many opportunities to further their education, from which they also benefit.

Our employee Rahya tells that she feels more comfortable in her home country because she knows how everything works there. She knows the language, the environment, the people, the culture. “This gives me a feeling of self-assurance,” she says. And this self-assurance radiates outwardly. Of course, it’s not easy at first to gain a foothold in a country that you neither know nor understand. Our employees tell us how experience began to slowly change in a positive direction, step by step. It takes time! The better their German got, the more they got to know their environment, once they got a job and thus met more people, especially locals, the more confident every single woman became. Hearing this makes us mighty proud! Because Valeriana’s ultimate goal is to bring society closer together.

“The women radiate such a positive energy that it’s infectious. It’s amazing to see them take charge of their own lives,” says coach Anne Marie. The Valerianas worked diligently, shared and exchanged a lot, learned a few new things and even got to know each other a little better.

Our daily goal is to empower women and to support them so that every one of them can become the best version of themselves. And that is exactly the feeling that they left last Thursday evening’s “Empowering women at work” workshop with. :)

To be continued: Find out more about how we empower our employees and help bring society closer together:

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