• What does the workplace of the future look like?
• Will the company office still play a major role in the future?
• Which new, innovative work environments will be needed?

All of us have been dealing with these questions intensely since the COVID-19 pandemic. New work means that meaningful, creative and agile work is becoming more and more important. The attractiveness of the workplace is increasingly important, especially among young people.

WHY do we need to deal with this topic?

• Corona has strongly influenced the lives of many people and accelerated the digital transformation. Home-working has tremendously increased. This has an impact on work and on the workplace of the future.
• We already see that changes in the workplace and even more changes will come. We need to be prepared.
• To find out what role the work environment will play in the company in the future.
• To find out how we can best support organizations design their workplaces.

WHAT do companies have to do to remain competitive and to provide a modern workplace with attractive working conditions? In addition to home offices, co-working spaces and mobile offices, employees will re-discover the office, especially as a place of identification and a social meeting place.

From our point of view, the organization must ensure that their offices fulfill six distinctive functions in the future:

1. Collaborating with each other on difficult issues
2. Being creative, finding ideas together
3. Networking: meeting others in person
4. Feeling good: enjoying the atmosphere
5. Identification with the company: experiencing the company spirit
6. Focused work, alone: time for concentration

Not every team needs all of these functions always, but overall the companies need to make sure they can all be covered. 

Companies have already got used to the constant increase in demands of today’s business world. A few years ago, digitization was the answer to adapting to these increased expectations. However, we have not yet got used to the fact that internal digitization is turning our companies upside down from within. Digitization doesn’t just mean that new technologies or applications are introduced, it means that companies have to, and will, change at their core, i.e. in their structures. The path of this change is called digital transformation and is the most important management task for the next few years.

Digital transformation combines three goals:

• Maximum focus on customers
• More attractive products and services
• Increased efficiency and yield

Managers face three challenges:

• Rebuilding structures
• Guiding people through the change
• Promoting creativity and innovation

Rebuilding structures

We see the first major challenges in the questions: How can we react quickly to the dynamics of the market and position ourselves best? How can we offer attractive services in the shortest possible time? Who are the people among us who understand best what customers actually need? What is the best way to get them to share what they know? So, where do we need to become more agile and creative?

Today, it is not enough to design technically sophisticated products. The focus needs to be on value for the customer. Processes must be rigorously examined from the customer’s perspective. Does the customer really need to know what every department is and isn’t responsible for? Why are decisions often moved up and down in the organization for days and weeks until ultimately nobody knows what they are about?

Current pain is quickly identified, but starting points for good, permanent solutions are often difficult to find. Ready-made solutions, à la Spotify, will soon be circulating and appear to make a lot of sense, but are usually unsuitable for „copy and paste“ implementation.

In these times of cyber-crime and data protection, dealing with technological risks is essential to avoid major damage and high, unforeseen costs.

Guiding people through change

This aspect of the transformation is the most difficult to accomplish. It’s not about a few employees having to adjust to new framework conditions. It is more about changing the „mindset“. It all starts with improving basic digital skills throughout the company – especially the executives, many of whom are „digital immigrants“ who find it difficult to understand the switch to digital processes because they simply don’t know enough about it. Comprehensive training initiatives need to be started in which „normal“ employees can, of course, also be included.

Promoting creativity and innovation

It is important that everyone in the company is open to experimentation. Trying out, evaluating, adapting – this requires courage, speed and an appetite for learning. At the same time, a positive error culture must be established. We’ve been talking about this for a number of years, but now it’s getting really serious. If errors are seen as “damage” rather than “information”, digital transformation won’t happen. Product cycles cannot be shortened without experimentation and a positive error culture.

The following approaches and methods can provide answers to the challenges we have mentioned:

• Design thinking, co-creation, multi-disciplinary collaboration
• Intensive stakeholder engagement and broad networking with maximum openness
• Lean start up and lean management
• Change and transformation management
• Agile organizational models
• Self-organization and self-responsibility
• New Work Leadership

In order to meet the needs the future will throw at us, it is no longer enough to just continue developing leaders’ leadership and management skills. The entire organization has to learn to develop continuously. Then digital transformation will pretty much take care of itself.

Thanks to Angelika Lošek, Sheila Purdy, Christopher Rettenbacher and Hansjörg Zahradnik for working on this article with me!

Yes, I know it’s a difficult topic that most of us don’t want to think or talk about. Uncertainty, fear, over-work, bereavement, isolation, loss of income, etc. etc. trigger mental health conditions or make existing ones worse. This makes it a topic that every organisation and every leader must talk about. Experiences during the Covid pandemic showed us all just how fragile our mental health can be.

Every person can life tough for their own unique combination of reasons:

• Too much work vs no work.
• Too noisy vs too quiet.
• Too much to do vs nothing to do.
• Worrying about family vs having no family to worry about.
• Isolation vs too many people at home.
• …

In recent years, and across industries, an increasing number of companies have begun adding wellness and mental health care resources to employee benefit packages and the unique challenges created by the pandemic only accelerated the demand. But while mindfulness, meditation and fitness classes are well-intentioned, they really are only putting a plaster over the real issues.

What is needed in the new world of work are measures that tackle the root causes of employees’ need for mental health support. Organisations and leaders need to be proactive and create a safe, supportive work environment. This means things such as:

• Instituting policies like flexible working hours and workplaces (e.g home office).
• Investing in relationship building among teams.
• Building trust between management functions and employees.
• Regular assessments of the balance between the employees’ workload and the resources they have.

The sense of purpose, camaraderie, connection and feeling that we’re achieving something is good for our mental state. The biggest impact we can have is to build work cultures that that actively promote and contribute to that. Organisations and leaders need to create a supportive culture helps everyone do their best work, develop and take us into a new, brighter future.

These supportive work cultures have 6 aspects:

• people have a work–life balance that supports good mental health;
• people who are going through a challenging time with their mental health are supported;
• people feel safe to raise concerns about their mental health;
• people don’t feel they have to hide any mental health challenges;
• mental health issues are not considered a weakness;
• disclosing mental health challenges does not impact a person’s career or stop them from getting a promotion.

All of this is easier said than done, for sure. However, the longest jouney starts with the first steps!