Result
Remote Work – the “New Normal Working Model”
The Company
The EMEA headquarters of a mechanical and plant engineering company in southern Germany, with its head office in America and several production sites in Germany and other countries; more than 10,000 employees worldwide.
The Challenge
The EMEA headquarters, with 300 employees in development, IT, marketing and sales, is – like many other companies – forced by the Corona crisis in spring 2020 to relocate the majority of the jobs from its headquarters to the home office. As the organisation has little experience with remote work, DIGITALTRANSFER is commissioned to develop and implement a remote work concept.
The Performance
1. Analysis of the current and target situation with respect to remote work
In step 1, a survey of the managers with the following results:
- There is a distinct culture of presence, all employees have so far worked together in open-plan offices, home office working was only granted in exceptional cases and then limited to a maximum of one day per week; the organisation has little experience with remote work
- During the lockdown, a transition was made to 100 percent remote work
- Communication and work processes are experienced as disorganised, confusing, and ineffective
- There is a desire for a uniform and pragmatic framework for “remote” working, rapid introduction of this framework, and close monitoring of its implementation
- The managers and their teams have no experience of working in distributed teams. Nor do they have any experience with the frameworks and tools of “Management 3.0”, which are fundamental to decentralised cooperation
In step 2, an analysis of the IT infrastructure and the available tools with the following results:
- In Office 365 Professional, the central IT department has been providing a tool for remote work for some time now. The software has been made available to every employee, but has so far only been used sporadically by individual employees
- Most teams still work using local server structures and communicate by email
- Since the central IT department had no concept for the introduction of Office 365 Professional, its introduction has so far been a failure from their point of view
2. Design of a specific framework for working in and with teams that are “distributed” in terms of their place of work, working time, field of expertise and hierarchical position within the organisation. The framework is based on the methods and tools of “Management 3.0”, tailored to the specific requirements of the company.
To this end, a workshop is conducted for the management team,
- in order to align the requirements of the managers with those of their teams and to create a mutually agreed concept for a remote model, and
- in order to compare how the resulting working methods can be implemented in the existing IT infrastructure using Office 365 Professional; including
- an introduction to the functional logic of Office 365 Professional and its underlying framework for work processes and methods, especially Scrum
- the adaptation of Scrum to the needs of the management team and the definition of a hybrid agile model to define the working practices necessary for the effective and efficient use of Office 365 Professional
3.Pilot
- Recruitment of a volunteer, technically skilled team to test the Office 365 utilisation concept for remote work for one week as part of a pilot phase
- At the end of the week, the pilot team and the management team jointly revise the concept in a workshop
Roll-out
- Kick-off meetings with all teams
- Appointment of mentors in the team who can help their colleagues quickly and easily with technical problems
- Continual 1:1 sparring over three months for all members of the management team in order to solve problems arising from the use of the new tool and integrate the new working methods into everyday working life rapidly
- Team coaching every fortnight for three months in order to consolidate the new routines and to resolve any resulting challenges and conflicts in a timely manner
The Result
- Within three weeks of the lockdown caused by Covid-19, the successful transition from “presence culture” to “remote work” for 300 employees was achieved by means of a process and methodology framework tailored to the organisation, enabling remote work for all teams based on Office 365
- High acceptance and rapid integration through
- intermeshing the IT tool Office 365 Professional with the necessary supporting communication and work processes
- adaptation to the requirements of the company
- at management level in the concept phase
- at team level in the test phase as part of a pilot project
- After three months, the management is highly satisfied with the increased initiative and self-management on the part of the employees due to remote work
- Satisfaction of the central IT department, as Office 365 Professional has been introduced into the company with a successful use case
- As the advantages of flexible working have become clear, the new working method introduced in the remote model will remain as the “New Normal Working Model” even after the lockdown
Keywords
Management 3.0, Scrum, remote work, corona crisis, Covid-19, decentralised work, distributed teams, New Normal Working Model, Office 365 Professional, Office 365 roll-out concept
