New Work - How we shape everyday work with our ways of working

new work

New Work - How we shape everyday work with our ways of working

Home office and flexible working - these terms are nothing new for a long time. The beginning of the corona pandemic really gave momentum to the discussion in many areas.

The day-to-day work of a consultant at many large management consultancies has been characterized by numerous, sometimes long, business trips in order to be able to work on site with the customer.

At it-economics, we have relied on the principle of regionality from the very beginning. In the spirit of New Work, our working methods are continuously checked and, if necessary, adapted to the circumstances.

The pandemic has set new standards in this area - and not just for us.

From April to October last year, we surveyed numerous employees, managers and customers of it-economics and derived new WoW standards (Ways of Working) for us from the survey results.

Overview of the WoW standards from it-economics

  • Digital & hybrid communication
  • Online & offline culture
  • Office design & desk sharing
  • Roadmap & Continuous Improvement

New work and work-life blending

New Work means that the culture of a company is designed to be adaptive and flexible and adapts agilely to the situation of the organization. Based on trust, New Work is characterized by "work-life blending", a collaborative, mobile and hybrid collaboration. This creates a win-win-win situation for the team, our customers and the company. In addition to saving costs and time, we sustainably improve the quality of work and availability by reducing travel.

Although the topic of "New Work" has existed since the XNUMXs, it has experienced a real upswing in recent years due to increasing digitization, recently also intensified by the corona pandemic.

Mobile working has long been an integral part of our employees' everyday work. Now the question arises for us how we would like to shape our cooperation, our new ways of working together in the future. What will day-to-day work as a consultant look like in the future? A solution must fit the needs of our team, our customers and it-economics as an organization and be flexible in the event of changes.

Digital & hybrid communication

Distributed work requires more communication, but at the same time clarity must not be lost when there is an increased volume of communication and information. When organizing meetings, the following applies to us: We make each of our meetings available as a hybrid (online & offline) and in this way give all colleagues the opportunity to participate either on site in the office or digitally. We are also working on reducing the number of communication channels to as few as possible so that the overview is not lost when there is a high density of information.

Online & offline culture

As the keyword "work-life blending" suggests, private and professional life are mixed more than ever in our team when working from home. It is therefore important for us not only to define "online" working hours, but also to promote and demand offline times. Because adhering to break times for relaxation and exercise in between and to relieve the eyes when working more on the screen is equally important to us - so we encourage our team to take enough offline time.

How important the issue of work-life balance is to us is also reflected on the rating platform kununu, on which it-economics is above the industry average: https://www.kununu.com/de/it-economics2/kultur.

Office design & desk sharing

It is part of our WoW standards to design our it-economics locations with individual, ergonomic and noise-insulated office equipment. Since the circumstances vary at each location, our team can bring in and implement their ideas and visions via our agile company management framework OKR (Objectives and Key Results).

The desks in the offices are assigned according to the desk sharing model. To make booking workspaces as uncomplicated as possible, we are now planning to introduce a desk sharing tool as part of our new WoW standards. In addition to reserving a workplace, you can also see when other team members are on site to optimize coordination.

Roadmap & Continuous Improvement

Our new WoW standards have been in effect since October 2021 and will be gradually developed with the help of the entire team - open feedback and free participation are the be-all and end-all.

2022 will be your year. With us.

Andrea Symanzik

author

Andrea Symanzik
Senior Consultant