New Work, Digitalization and the Unavoidable Transformation of Companies
Tags: Coronavirus, Digitalization, Work Ethic, New Work, Transformation

by Ricardo Amaral, On Purpose Associate at GERMANTECH

Change became inevitable this year, new ways of working couldn’t be avoided. Companies of all sizes had to disrupt their routines, which they have built over the years. There was pressure on their side with lost income and clients, pressure on people’s side with having to arrange a space at home to work while taking care of the kids, pets or worrying from a long-distance about the elderly.

On the other hand — more agile companies like startups were able to bounce back a bit faster than the majority of companies, due to their culture of fast innovation, disruptive iterations, adaptation, and remote work. They were already applying these “New” ways of “Work” and had made all their processes digital by design. Therefore it appears that these are unavoidable concepts that every company should apply to survive.

I couldn’t help but question ourselves:

Why can’t companies avoid applying New Work concepts?

Because New Work is about blending life together with all its entities private, public, career etc., during a time when this crisis has melted the boundaries all together. This reevaluation of the importance of work in everyone’s life and how to sustain such a process; it’s rooted in the individual employees wishes and demands to enable their working environment and their social roles to better come together — especially now. It’s the freedom to work on what you really want and create a culture of change through a systematic model of competencies that are relevant to work in the highly complex, dynamic world we live in now. A new culture of emotional stability, sustainable choices within the whole chain. Thus processes need new frameworks, concepts, and methodologies to flourish, and the support of new technologies to create autonomy and self-sufficiency. By digitalizing processes and repetitive work, we integrate the whole team, create space for creativity and diversity of activities for a more satisfying, fulfilling, and happy work environment and job descriptions.

We need to understand the philosophy behind these concepts, get to know the foundations of these new methodologies and frameworks so we can give enough support for the transformation of our company. We want our companies and colleagues to be future-ready.

And I believe that the foundation for dynamic transformation and sustainable success doesn’t come only top-down, but more effectively when it is also bottom-up. Everyone needs to be involved if we want to manage change more effectively within our companies.

So what exactly is New Work?

New work is flexibility, liberty, and greater efficiency. As Frithjof Bergmann said: “It’s the effort to redirect the use of technology so that it isn’t used simply to speed up the work and in the process ruin the world. (…) The purpose of technology should be to reduce the oppressive, spirit-breaking, dementing power of work — to use machines to do the work that is boring and repetitive. Then human beings can do creative, imaginative, uplifting work. So New Work is simply the attempt to allow people, for at least some of their time, to do something they passionately want to do, something they deeply believe in.”

It is about system changing from the base up and thinking of what it means to be a more sustainable business in a more holistic way: profitable, good for society, and fulfilling for its employees. With that in mind, we need to start thinking of business sustainability in three dimensions: as a person, as a company, and as a society.

As a person, we need to get in touch with new methodologies as well as new digital tools and mindset for giving space for new ways of working in our life and our day-to-day. As a company, we need to develop and implement new ideas, identifying new promising approaches through innovative problem solving, and creating sustainable business solutions. And as a society, we need to visualize the systems we are in, from work-life balance dynamics to sustainability by design to be able to recognize and better react to the challenges of tomorrow.

At GERMANTECH we apply these ideas by automating all of our processes and using technology for effective communication between the team. Because we are 100% digitalized, we can foster creative ideas and solutions and try new methodologies in a very agile way. For example, when lockdown came into place, we could easily switch 100% to home office, without deeply disrupting our work routines. We were able to quickly react to the new reality presented to us, create, and deliver new projects while in lockdown. We talked about it in one of our podcasts at the beginning of the year (link here).

We need imagination, creativity, and courage in these times of crisis. These skills can’t be ordered, but we can actively promote them within ourselves and our companies. We need to activate individual creative power to transform organizations from within. Are you and your company ready for that?

Don’t miss our Webinar with Robin Weninger about New Work and how it will be hard to avoid it in the near future.

Free ticket on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/warum-unternehmen-ohne-new-work-nicht-uberleben-tickets-137279206803