New Work is definitely a buzzword of our time. It shows up in very different contexts. Sometimes it’s about technology, sometimes about the free choice of workplace and time, and almost always about digital transformation. But what exactly is New Work? And what can it do for companies?
Again and again, the topic of job sharing is associated with women; with the re-entry of mothers after parental leave; with the compatibility of work and family life. At the same time, the working model can do much more – and is particularly appealing to men.
Eva Schubert is currently living her dream: she lives and works on Tenerife. She converted her 9-to-5 job as a social media coordinator into a job share and swapped her office in Cologne for a coworking opportunity in Tenerife. Eva told us in an interview how this came about, how life and work in Tenerife are, and whether she wants to remain flexible and independent of location in the future.
bio verlag publishes the customer magazines Schrot & Korn, Cosmia and Ö-Magazin, among other things. Since 2011, bio verlag has dealt with three things: capital, decisions, and success. Participation and responsibility are the basis for their cooperative work, along with family-friendly working time models and a lot of commitment. All good reasons to have a longer #ChangeAgent interview in this case. We spoke with their managing director, Sabine Kauffmann, about the history of the publishing house, employee participation, decision-making processes, and the working world of tomorrow.
Who actually decided that almost every task, every job, would fit best into a 40-hour full-time position? Who says that? And who can judge that?
Isn’t that an absolutely crazy assumption? Outdated? Generalized? And, on closer inspection, incredibly inflexible? Doesn’t this (hardly ever questioned) assumption of the ideal 40-hour work week mean that we, as an employer, tend to build in too much capacity for tasks that could be accomplished in a few hours – and far too little for those that clearly require more? Doesn’t it also cause us to force people into a scheme that is not guaranteed to be life-phase-oriented?
Can organizations even transition from being elephants to gazelles when they stick to this very basic thought pattern?