Nowadays, being in therapy is no longer something to be ashamed of. More and more people openly acknowledge that there are things that they cannot manage on their own. Some might even say it is “en-vogue” to go to therapy. My house, my car, my therapist, and so on. Most likely every development brings its exaggeration with it.
And yet: Perhaps we need some kind of large-scale therapy – in companies! Perhaps a broadly applied cognitive behavioural therapy will finally bring about the much-needed breakthrough in thinking. Maybe only the direct confrontation with the knots in our own heads, which can’t be untied with home remedies, such as the occasional workshop or the diligent consumption of the Tandemploy blog, will help. Read more
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The “Gig Economy” has a bad reputation: the US company Uber is on a suing spree, AirBnB has made it necessary to create new rental laws, delivery services and platforms for creative services are under fire. Ok, hold on, Gig Economy – what was that again? – The analogy to the musical gig actually fits quite well. Similar to artists struggling from performance to performance until the big breakthrough comes, freelancers and self-employed people work themselves from job to job, with the big difference that for them there is no prospect of a big breakthrough. That is because these brokering platforms – Uber, AirBnB, 99designs, etc. – claim these for themselves. They are often worth billions, while the actual workers are working under bad, sometimes even illegal conditions.
So, what exactly is desirable about that? Read more
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Heike Gäbler is the founder of the Female Co-Founders initiative, which strives to promote more diversity in founding teams, especially in the German start-up ecosystem. The focus is on networking opportunities for women and men who are looking for a female co-founder. In regard to our focus topic this week – “Emotional Agility” – we asked Heike about her perspective: What is her opinion on the widespread assumption that women are better able to show and use their emotions in a work context? Read more
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Many people have experienced the past weeks and months since the beginning of the Corona crisis as an emotional rollercoaster ride. Uncertainty, anger, gratitude, feeling overwhelmed, a spirit of optimism – living and working under completely new circumstances have made the different facets of human emotions visible not only in the personal realm but also between colleagues and superiors. Therefore, leadership in times of Corona requires allowing much more space for feelings. But how much feeling is good in a work context? How much of yourself do you take with you to work? How vulnerable do you want to appear? Should it be ok to show unfiltered feelings at all times? Or only the good ones? And then what to do with the less pleasant ones? Are emotional people possibly even better leaders?
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Since March of this year, Digital Leadership primarily means Remote Leadership. Companies are discovering that being able to work from any location comes with many advantages, but also with new challenges. Ultimately, they all lead to one big question: How much physical proximity does leadership need?
At Tandemploy we also ask ourselves this question again and again. Our 30-person team has been working in many different locations, not just since Corona. At the same time, we have a strong home base with our Berlin office. However, this is not used by all employees to the same extent. How does that affect the team dynamics? How do team leaders manage to make all employees feel involved? And how can digital communication tools promote good leadership instead of hindering it?
Here we summarize our top 5 learnings from seven years of Tandemploy (and ten weeks of lockdown) for you.Read more
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Tandemploy means “think big” – and this also applies to our definition of skills:
”Skill is the infinite potential of people in an organization. It is everything people bring with them and want to contribute.”
(The sky’s the limit and so on.)
When is a skill a skill
If you want to work with skills, the definition should be a bit more specific. Because not only the HR department has clear criteria and classifications, our skill matching software also follows a system that identifies and classifies skills. And: If we want to discuss skills that companies urgently need now and in the future, we need to be clear about what we are talking about. Read more
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In our series “Employee Experience” we will highlight all critical touchpoints of the “Employee Journey”. Today: Professional and personal development
“Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps”, was the title of a successful guidebook published in the year 1998. And even today, people from the entertainment industry fill huge venues with their stories about shoe-buying women and taciturn men. How simple would the world be if we could just label and categorize everyone. But let’s be honest: it would also be a pretty boring world.
Hence: Cheers to diversity! – Many companies would even sign on to that now – at least if a press representative is nearby. The topic of “diversity” clearly shows the difference between employer branding – meaning how companies would like it to be – and the employee experience – meaning how employees actually experience their work environment. Designing a good employee experience (unlike branding) requires that companies, and especially the people in talent management, really know and understand the individual skills, wishes and needs of their colleagues. Making new experiences and encounters possible, when they are needed and desired, replaces classic career development based on the “Design & Deliver” principle.Read more
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Social Distancing has been around longer than Corona. In many companies “keeping a distance” is part of the company culture. What social isolation does to people is now increasingly being highlighted by Covid-19 and it’s consequences. Finally, you might want to say! Because being cut off from other people can be just as harmful for the individual as for the organization as a whole. If you don’t feel a connection to your colleagues or to the company, you may be able to “check off” your to-do list reasonably well, but feel little motivation to contribute ideas and get creative in finding the best solutions that will benefit the organization. A Gallup study has shown, that employees who have a friend or close connection to other coworkers in the company, are 7 times more likely to be invested in the company, than people who feel lonely on the job.
But what does “lonely” mean in the work context? Is everyone that is assigned to a small, closed-off department and sits in an individual office processing excel spreadsheets automatically lonely? Of course not. Loneliness is a feeling that manifests itself very differently and under very different circumstances for many different people. In the work context it is often the result of a lack of permissions, possibilities, and channels for contact with others. And consequently a result of structures, that – consciously or not – lead to social isolation. One could say, that rigid hierarchies and department boundaries have, in many instances, lead to a company culture of social distancing.Read more
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In our series “Employee Experience” we will highlight all critical touchpoints of the “Employee Journey”. Today: Onboarding.
It’s 2008, on a plane to London. On board: an aspiring intern with butterflies in her stomach. Huge anticipation, because getting the position was not easy. She’s really looking forward to giving it her all. The sky’s the limit and so on.
When she finally pushes through the narrow glass door to the offices in the City of London, huge backpack on her back – sweaty but happy – ready for more warmth, a bit of glitter and confetti….nothing happens. Instead of a warm welcome, as the previous email correspondence had led her to expect, her contact person doesn’t even get up from his chair. He is kind of in the middle of something.
She is left standing there and doesn’t know what to do with herself. There is no desk for her. The rom-com she had envisioned in her head of the intern from Berlin that turns the London PR world upside-down is showing first signs of turning into a tragedy.
Will it really turn out to be this terrible?Read more
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In the past few weeks, we have repeatedly been attested war-like circumstances in view of Covid-19. For HR managers nothing new so far. They have been at war for years, the “War for Talents”. This bellicose phrase has become part of the standard vocabulary in the HR field.
There are three main reasons for the tough HR challenges in the talent market:
the global competition,
the demographic shift,
the change in values, especially among young people.
Covid-19 and its aftermath now give the combating parties – companies all over the world – an involuntary cease-fire. The uncertain situation has led to hiring freezes and consequently to free time, which HR staff could and should use to reevaluate whether, over the past years, they have been fighting for the best people with the right “weapons”.Read more
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Employee Experience begins with empathy. If a company’s talent managers really want to understand what experiences people make in the course of their professional life, they have to try putting themselves in their position as best as possible. To feel what they feel. To understand their needs. Only then can they design products that create positive experiences in connection with working in the company.
Wait a second, “Products”?? But employees aren’t customers! Or are they? Read more
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Simply put, a matching process brings together what belongs together. To each their own or a lid to every pot – or rather, learning needs and know-how or project and skills. And here we are, right in the middle of Skill Matching and the question of what the whole thing has to do with the changing world of work. Read more
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I am in my mid 30s and therefore do not, by definition, belong to the so-called Digital Natives. But even though, digital tools are a natural part of my day. Half of my life is on Trello, I write about topics revolving around the digital transformation and I work remotely with different constellations of people and with a wide variety of sharing tools. I consider myself to be one of the “young and wild”, the digital heads and the like – and then I sit on the metro amongst a group of 12-year-olds and think to myself: I don’t have a clue what they are talking about. ‘Have you seen Lisa’s meme on TikTok – so f*#$% LIT!’ While I inconspicuously search for “Tick Tock” on Ecosia, I catch myself thinking ‘When I was your age, I was playing football outside with my friends, instead of wasting so much time on a smartphone.’
I had always sworn to myself never to say things like “When I was your age…”. Suddenly I feel very old. Not even 20 years separate me from these youngsters. Fifty years separate them from my parents, of which one is still working. I ask myself: How can people, that have been socialized in two completely different worlds, work together? In one company? Towards a common goal?Read more
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Remember May 2018? That was the month the expansion of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was enacted. Months in advance people were up in arms about what this new regulation would mean for software vendors and email marketing (newsletters). Well, and then May came and went and, surprisingly, life continued in a normal and unexcited manner. Wouldn’t it be great if we could maintain that level of normalcy and calm, while engaging in an even more extensive discussion about data that has the potential to radically change the way we work and live? Let’s dive right in. Read more
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2020 could be the year in which we consistently start using good data to facilitate good work flows. Good, in the sense of “good for everyone” – for companies and their goals, for employees and for society as a whole. But also for the sake of planetary resources. Because a resource-conserving lifestyle is closely related to a working world that allows for the freedom to engage in a responsible and conscience lifestyle outside of work.
How can this be successful?
The simple answer might be: through digitalization. If machines took over more jobs and human work could be automated, then everyone would have more time, right?
Unfortunately, it isn’t quite as simple as that. Read more
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In the summer of 2019, we asked 100 people with and without management responsibility to answer the following questions: How well does knowledge transfer work in your company? What sources do you and your employees use to inform you? How well do you know your colleagues? And would you like to learn more from them? We were particularly interested in whether there were differences between employees with and without management responsibility.
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(Employee Communities – Part 2. Get prepared by reading Part 1 here.)
Innovation comes from the community – this was the experience of the Danish company Lego in the late 1990s. Today, 20 years later, we are all naturally active in communities – in social networks, for example. In coworking spaces, good community management has long been regarded as one of the strongest quality criteria. People with digital mindsets are community minded; they think openly and networked oriented.
And what about companies?
If they want to win these people over, they should do the same and rely on networking! By allowing, enabling and – even better – actively promoting the development of employee communities, they open up completely new opportunities for internal interaction, knowledge transfer, and recruiting. Read more
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Denmark, 1998. Lego Mindstorms, a series of customizable and hardware-controllable robots, hits the market. It doesn’t take long for the first adult Lego fans to hack the software and start customizing the robots to their liking. The results are presented on users’ own websites and forums. Lego has two options:
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Learning Out Loud: “If you want to learn something, start teaching it!” – Interview with Ellen Herschel of the Edutrainment Company
Ellen Herschel is a Key Account Manager and Learning Experience Designer at Edutrainment Company GmbH. Together with her colleagues, she designs learning solutions for companies. The aim: to enable employees to implement what they have learned from their everyday work and to keep their desire to learn high. In an interview, she explains how this is achieved, how employees learn in a networked way, and how managers create a good learning environment. Read more
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There are two groups that companies probably know pretty well:
their customers
their competition.
Because they pay a lot of attention to both right from the start: target group analysis, sales pitches, customer journey, competitor analysis, tracking, clustering… and so on. The idea behind it: the product must fit 100%! Then we’ll be successful – and better than the competition.
This thinking certainly has its justification. In 1980. Today, it’s outdated. Read more
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The Blackbird Collective from Berlin helps startups and medium-sized companies hire the right people. Blackbird was founded in 2015 by Artur Kos. Since then, the Blackbird Collective has grown to 9 employees, who all work 4 days (or fewer) a week, regardless of location and with fixed contracts. We talked with Artur about this special arrangement, new life and work models, and Blackbird’s vision.
https://www.tandemploy.com/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/07/201905Artur-Kos.jpg449800Alicia Metzhttps://www.tandemploy.com/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/03/Logo-Tandemploy-Distance-Corona-300x65.pngAlicia Metz2019-07-22 21:30:332019-07-22 21:30:33„You don't need to make work your life to do a great job.“ - Interview with Artur Kos from the Blackbird Collective
People network all the time: getting advice in online forums, communicating with friends in chats, and sharing information that they find relevant on social networks. At the same time, companies still find networking a hard nut to crack. It’s a shame, because everything they need on the path to become networked organizations is clearly already there: people who know how to network (even if they would not call it that in a private context) and who like to do it – but only if doing so makes sense to them. So, what can companies do to initiate the internal exchange urgently needed to produce innovative solutions? Read more
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A recent study by management researchers Julian Kawohl and Jonas Wieland from the University of Applied Sciences (HTW) Berlin concludes that 64 of the 80 largest medium-sized companies lack digital experience among top management. The scientists examined the lives of almost all managers of the 80 largest German medium-sized companies, including companies such as Rewe, Bosch, Heraeus and Boehringer Ingelheim.
The study thus provides a starting point for active knowledge transfer in a company in two ways: Read more
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Sebastian Kolberg is the Change Manager for Digital Transformation at Bayer AG. In this role he supports people and teams to journey together and shape digital transformation. As a #ChangeAgent, he is particularly interested in promoting collaborations, establishing trusting networks and jointly challenging the status quo with a view toward the customer. Good reasons to introduce him here.
https://www.tandemploy.com/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/06/201904Sebastian-Kolberg1-1.jpg450800Alicia Metzhttps://www.tandemploy.com/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/03/Logo-Tandemploy-Distance-Corona-300x65.pngAlicia Metz2019-04-24 06:52:232019-06-07 16:41:09#ChangeAgent Sebastian Kolberg – Change through collaboration and trust
Agility, knowledge exchange, silo teardown, cultural change, networking: these are some of the major topics in these times of digital change. So it seems natural that we’d find the movement around Working Out Loud (named after the eponymous book by John Stepper) very exciting. But what is this “loud work” anyway? And what exactly does the method have to do with flexibilization, digitization and the dismantling of silos? How can Working Out Loud be implemented? And what does it do in organizations?
https://www.tandemploy.com/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/12/201711workoingoutloud.jpg393700redaktionhttps://www.tandemploy.com/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/03/Logo-Tandemploy-Distance-Corona-300x65.pngredaktion2019-04-18 10:32:412020-02-18 10:32:58Make your work visible! – How Working Out Loud works
The human factor: with therapy and technology into the future
Nowadays, being in therapy is no longer something to be ashamed of. More and more people openly acknowledge that there are things that they cannot manage on their own. Some might even say it is “en-vogue” to go to therapy. My house, my car, my therapist, and so on. Most likely every development brings its exaggeration with it.
And yet: Perhaps we need some kind of large-scale therapy – in companies! Perhaps a broadly applied cognitive behavioural therapy will finally bring about the much-needed breakthrough in thinking. Maybe only the direct confrontation with the knots in our own heads, which can’t be untied with home remedies, such as the occasional workshop or the diligent consumption of the Tandemploy blog, will help. Read more
Short-term internal assignments: Gig Economy – with people in mind!
The “Gig Economy” has a bad reputation: the US company Uber is on a suing spree, AirBnB has made it necessary to create new rental laws, delivery services and platforms for creative services are under fire. Ok, hold on, Gig Economy – what was that again? – The analogy to the musical gig actually fits quite well. Similar to artists struggling from performance to performance until the big breakthrough comes, freelancers and self-employed people work themselves from job to job, with the big difference that for them there is no prospect of a big breakthrough. That is because these brokering platforms – Uber, AirBnB, 99designs, etc. – claim these for themselves. They are often worth billions, while the actual workers are working under bad, sometimes even illegal conditions.
So, what exactly is desirable about that? Read more
#ChangeAgent Heike Gäbler: “Complexity can never be answered with one-sidedness.”
Heike Gäbler is the founder of the Female Co-Founders initiative, which strives to promote more diversity in founding teams, especially in the German start-up ecosystem. The focus is on networking opportunities for women and men who are looking for a female co-founder. In regard to our focus topic this week – “Emotional Agility” – we asked Heike about her perspective: What is her opinion on the widespread assumption that women are better able to show and use their emotions in a work context? Read more
Emotional Agility: Why leadership and empathy must go hand in hand
Many people have experienced the past weeks and months since the beginning of the Corona crisis as an emotional rollercoaster ride. Uncertainty, anger, gratitude, feeling overwhelmed, a spirit of optimism – living and working under completely new circumstances have made the different facets of human emotions visible not only in the personal realm but also between colleagues and superiors. Therefore, leadership in times of Corona requires allowing much more space for feelings. But how much feeling is good in a work context? How much of yourself do you take with you to work? How vulnerable do you want to appear? Should it be ok to show unfiltered feelings at all times? Or only the good ones? And then what to do with the less pleasant ones? Are emotional people possibly even better leaders?
Read more
Digital Leadership: Be compass, not big brother!
Since March of this year, Digital Leadership primarily means Remote Leadership. Companies are discovering that being able to work from any location comes with many advantages, but also with new challenges. Ultimately, they all lead to one big question: How much physical proximity does leadership need?
At Tandemploy we also ask ourselves this question again and again. Our 30-person team has been working in many different locations, not just since Corona. At the same time, we have a strong home base with our Berlin office. However, this is not used by all employees to the same extent. How does that affect the team dynamics? How do team leaders manage to make all employees feel involved? And how can digital communication tools promote good leadership instead of hindering it?
Here we summarize our top 5 learnings from seven years of Tandemploy (and ten weeks of lockdown) for you. Read more
Knowledge, competence, talent – what counts in the end: liquid skills!
So what are skills?
Tandemploy means “think big” – and this also applies to our definition of skills:
(The sky’s the limit and so on.)
When is a skill a skill
If you want to work with skills, the definition should be a bit more specific. Because not only the HR department has clear criteria and classifications, our skill matching software also follows a system that identifies and classifies skills. And: If we want to discuss skills that companies urgently need now and in the future, we need to be clear about what we are talking about. Read more
X or exit: Three radical theses on the employee experience – and how it can be done differently and better
In our series “Employee Experience” we will highlight all critical touchpoints of the “Employee Journey”. Today: Professional and personal development
“Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps”, was the title of a successful guidebook published in the year 1998. And even today, people from the entertainment industry fill huge venues with their stories about shoe-buying women and taciturn men. How simple would the world be if we could just label and categorize everyone. But let’s be honest: it would also be a pretty boring world.
Hence: Cheers to diversity! – Many companies would even sign on to that now – at least if a press representative is nearby. The topic of “diversity” clearly shows the difference between employer branding – meaning how companies would like it to be – and the employee experience – meaning how employees actually experience their work environment. Designing a good employee experience (unlike branding) requires that companies, and especially the people in talent management, really know and understand the individual skills, wishes and needs of their colleagues. Making new experiences and encounters possible, when they are needed and desired, replaces classic career development based on the “Design & Deliver” principle. Read more
Social Distancing as company culture? – Move closer together, now more than ever!
Social Distancing has been around longer than Corona. In many companies “keeping a distance” is part of the company culture. What social isolation does to people is now increasingly being highlighted by Covid-19 and it’s consequences. Finally, you might want to say! Because being cut off from other people can be just as harmful for the individual as for the organization as a whole. If you don’t feel a connection to your colleagues or to the company, you may be able to “check off” your to-do list reasonably well, but feel little motivation to contribute ideas and get creative in finding the best solutions that will benefit the organization. A Gallup study has shown, that employees who have a friend or close connection to other coworkers in the company, are 7 times more likely to be invested in the company, than people who feel lonely on the job.
But what does “lonely” mean in the work context? Is everyone that is assigned to a small, closed-off department and sits in an individual office processing excel spreadsheets automatically lonely? Of course not. Loneliness is a feeling that manifests itself very differently and under very different circumstances for many different people. In the work context it is often the result of a lack of permissions, possibilities, and channels for contact with others. And consequently a result of structures, that – consciously or not – lead to social isolation. One could say, that rigid hierarchies and department boundaries have, in many instances, lead to a company culture of social distancing. Read more
There is no second chance for a good onboarding! – Bring new colleagues on board with these tools
Employee Experience – Touchpoint 1:
In our series “Employee Experience” we will highlight all critical touchpoints of the “Employee Journey”. Today: Onboarding.
It’s 2008, on a plane to London. On board: an aspiring intern with butterflies in her stomach. Huge anticipation, because getting the position was not easy. She’s really looking forward to giving it her all. The sky’s the limit and so on.
When she finally pushes through the narrow glass door to the offices in the City of London, huge backpack on her back – sweaty but happy – ready for more warmth, a bit of glitter and confetti….nothing happens. Instead of a warm welcome, as the previous email correspondence had led her to expect, her contact person doesn’t even get up from his chair. He is kind of in the middle of something.
She is left standing there and doesn’t know what to do with herself. There is no desk for her. The rom-com she had envisioned in her head of the intern from Berlin that turns the London PR world upside-down is showing first signs of turning into a tragedy.
Will it really turn out to be this terrible? Read more
“War for Skills”: Get the changemakers out of the isolation of the labs!
In the past few weeks, we have repeatedly been attested war-like circumstances in view of Covid-19. For HR managers nothing new so far. They have been at war for years, the “War for Talents”. This bellicose phrase has become part of the standard vocabulary in the HR field.
There are three main reasons for the tough HR challenges in the talent market:
Covid-19 and its aftermath now give the combating parties – companies all over the world – an involuntary cease-fire. The uncertain situation has led to hiring freezes and consequently to free time, which HR staff could and should use to reevaluate whether, over the past years, they have been fighting for the best people with the right “weapons”. Read more
Don’t mess with your X: Anyone can manage HR! But what about designing HX?
Employee Experience begins with empathy. If a company’s talent managers really want to understand what experiences people make in the course of their professional life, they have to try putting themselves in their position as best as possible. To feel what they feel. To understand their needs. Only then can they design products that create positive experiences in connection with working in the company.
Wait a second, “Products”?? But employees aren’t customers! Or are they? Read more
What is Skill Matching and why should we do it?
Simply put, a matching process brings together what belongs together. To each their own or a lid to every pot – or rather, learning needs and know-how or project and skills. And here we are, right in the middle of Skill Matching and the question of what the whole thing has to do with the changing world of work.
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Talkin’ ’bout my…um, your generation: this is how the young and the old work really well together
I am in my mid 30s and therefore do not, by definition, belong to the so-called Digital Natives. But even though, digital tools are a natural part of my day. Half of my life is on Trello, I write about topics revolving around the digital transformation and I work remotely with different constellations of people and with a wide variety of sharing tools. I consider myself to be one of the “young and wild”, the digital heads and the like – and then I sit on the metro amongst a group of 12-year-olds and think to myself: I don’t have a clue what they are talking about. ‘Have you seen Lisa’s meme on TikTok – so f*#$% LIT!’ While I inconspicuously search for “Tick Tock” on Ecosia, I catch myself thinking ‘When I was your age, I was playing football outside with my friends, instead of wasting so much time on a smartphone.’
I had always sworn to myself never to say things like “When I was your age…”. Suddenly I feel very old. Not even 20 years separate me from these youngsters. Fifty years separate them from my parents, of which one is still working. I ask myself: How can people, that have been socialized in two completely different worlds, work together? In one company? Towards a common goal? Read more
Dance to the Algorithm: The Tandemploy Data Check – imitation encouraged
Remember May 2018? That was the month the expansion of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was enacted. Months in advance people were up in arms about what this new regulation would mean for software vendors and email marketing (newsletters). Well, and then May came and went and, surprisingly, life continued in a normal and unexcited manner. Wouldn’t it be great if we could maintain that level of normalcy and calm, while engaging in an even more extensive discussion about data that has the potential to radically change the way we work and live? Let’s dive right in. Read more
#BigIdeas2020: Forget the hype around “Big Data” – from now on let’s build a hype around “Good Data”!
2020 could be the year in which we consistently start using good data to facilitate good work flows. Good, in the sense of “good for everyone” – for companies and their goals, for employees and for society as a whole. But also for the sake of planetary resources. Because a resource-conserving lifestyle is closely related to a working world that allows for the freedom to engage in a responsible and conscience lifestyle outside of work.
How can this be successful?
The simple answer might be: through digitalization. If machines took over more jobs and human work could be automated, then everyone would have more time, right?
Unfortunately, it isn’t quite as simple as that. Read more
Study on knowlegde transfer in companies: Employees want to – but are prevented from doing so by structures
In the summer of 2019, we asked 100 people with and without management responsibility to answer the following questions: How well does knowledge transfer work in your company? What sources do you and your employees use to inform you? How well do you know your colleagues? And would you like to learn more from them? We were particularly interested in whether there were differences between employees with and without management responsibility.
HR means community building! – How to build and maintain an internal community – or two, or 20.
(Employee Communities – Part 2. Get prepared by reading Part 1 here.)
Innovation comes from the community – this was the experience of the Danish company Lego in the late 1990s. Today, 20 years later, we are all naturally active in communities – in social networks, for example. In coworking spaces, good community management has long been regarded as one of the strongest quality criteria. People with digital mindsets are community minded; they think openly and networked oriented.
And what about companies?
If they want to win these people over, they should do the same and rely on networking! By allowing, enabling and – even better – actively promoting the development of employee communities, they open up completely new opportunities for internal interaction, knowledge transfer, and recruiting. Read more
Employee Communities – Part 1: How professionals with a digital mindset work
Denmark, 1998. Lego Mindstorms, a series of customizable and hardware-controllable robots, hits the market. It doesn’t take long for the first adult Lego fans to hack the software and start customizing the robots to their liking. The results are presented on users’ own websites and forums. Lego has two options:
Lego opts for the latter – and thus, unplanned, initiates a customer community.
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Learning Out Loud: “If you want to learn something, start teaching it!” – Interview with Ellen Herschel of the Edutrainment Company
Learning Out Loud: “If you want to learn something, start teaching it!” – Interview with Ellen Herschel of the Edutrainment Company
Ellen Herschel is a Key Account Manager and Learning Experience Designer at Edutrainment Company GmbH. Together with her colleagues, she designs learning solutions for companies. The aim: to enable employees to implement what they have learned from their everyday work and to keep their desire to learn high. In an interview, she explains how this is achieved, how employees learn in a networked way, and how managers create a good learning environment. Read more
People Analytics: Know your team just as well as your customers!
There are two groups that companies probably know pretty well:
Because they pay a lot of attention to both right from the start: target group analysis, sales pitches, customer journey, competitor analysis, tracking, clustering… and so on. The idea behind it: the product must fit 100%! Then we’ll be successful – and better than the competition.
This thinking certainly has its justification. In 1980. Today, it’s outdated. Read more
„You don’t need to make work your life to do a great job.“ – Interview with Artur Kos from the Blackbird Collective
The Blackbird Collective from Berlin helps startups and medium-sized companies hire the right people. Blackbird was founded in 2015 by Artur Kos. Since then, the Blackbird Collective has grown to 9 employees, who all work 4 days (or fewer) a week, regardless of location and with fixed contracts. We talked with Artur about this special arrangement, new life and work models, and Blackbird’s vision.
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Putting the Lid on its Pot: How to Start Active Networking in Your Business
People network all the time: getting advice in online forums, communicating with friends in chats, and sharing information that they find relevant on social networks. At the same time, companies still find networking a hard nut to crack. It’s a shame, because everything they need on the path to become networked organizations is clearly already there: people who know how to network (even if they would not call it that in a private context) and who like to do it – but only if doing so makes sense to them. So, what can companies do to initiate the internal exchange urgently needed to produce innovative solutions? Read more
Sharing is caring: This is how knowledge transfer in the company succeeds
A recent study by management researchers Julian Kawohl and Jonas Wieland from the University of Applied Sciences (HTW) Berlin concludes that 64 of the 80 largest medium-sized companies lack digital experience among top management. The scientists examined the lives of almost all managers of the 80 largest German medium-sized companies, including companies such as Rewe, Bosch, Heraeus and Boehringer Ingelheim.
The study thus provides a starting point for active knowledge transfer in a company in two ways: Read more
#ChangeAgent Sebastian Kolberg – Change through collaboration and trust
Sebastian Kolberg is the Change Manager for Digital Transformation at Bayer AG. In this role he supports people and teams to journey together and shape digital transformation. As a #ChangeAgent, he is particularly interested in promoting collaborations, establishing trusting networks and jointly challenging the status quo with a view toward the customer. Good reasons to introduce him here.
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Make your work visible! – How Working Out Loud works
Agility, knowledge exchange, silo teardown, cultural change, networking: these are some of the major topics in these times of digital change. So it seems natural that we’d find the movement around Working Out Loud (named after the eponymous book by John Stepper) very exciting. But what is this “loud work” anyway? And what exactly does the method have to do with flexibilization, digitization and the dismantling of silos? How can Working Out Loud be implemented? And what does it do in organizations?
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