Collage of new rooms

New working worlds

HELLO NEW MINDSET

VDI Wissensforum is growing. And this growth, as well as increasing digitalization, has led to a need for restructuring. Facing transformation means not just technical change, but also change in leadership and cooperation, internal culture and new spatial concept as well.

Our concept is based on 3 areas: Cultural Change, Places and Tools and forms the basis of our new corporate culture. This new corporate culture is not a new status quo, but rather a foundation for continuous improvement.

CULTURAL CHANGE

We didn’t just run off and change a little bit here and there to make it more agile. Our cultural change involved detailed planning and an analysis of needs, driven by our employees in consultation with management and the works council.

We identified 4 areas that are forward-looking for us and form the pillars of our future cooperation:

PERSONNEL DEVELOPMENT

New ways: trying new career paths. Transferring responsibility and making decisions independently. Being brave.

ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Behavior: shaping employees rather than governing them. Employees collect ideas and implement them. The further development of the organization comes from developing employees.

COMMUNICATION

Out of the box: short and uncomplicated routes, an informal culture and various interactive formats such as brown bad sessions and scrum and design thinking workshops increase our transparency and cooperation.

CULTURE

Identify now: the individual determines their action, with team collaboration opportunities. Expertise and self-organization is in focus. New thinking, new action, new work.

[Translate to English:] Laptop aus Pappe mit neuer Arbeitsfläche auf dem Bildschirm

PLACES

To be sure of how we want to work in the future, we’ve summarized our needs with the following 2 questions:

  1. Where and how have I already experienced the future?
  2. Where and what is my best place to work?

It quickly became clear that the space needs to be flexible. Because on the one hand, you want to be close to colleagues to be able to quickly and simply engage with one another. And on the other hand, there need to be areas you can retreat to work in a concentrated fashion.

It wasn’t clear how this could realistically look. 2 workshops, a great deal of creativity, a new environment and a whole lot of fun were necessary to see it.

THE EXPLORE AND CREATE WORKSHOPS

In our explore workshop, we created miniature versions of our future workspaces with Lego bricks. This gave us an initial overview and impression of our options. But that wasn't enough. We went to work in an old warehouse to make our special concept tangible. During our create workshop, we built our working space in actual size from cardboard.

Images from the workshop

Collage of a workshop

Timo Taubitz explains the approach

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THE RESULT

Cardboard turned into reality! A modern space was created, in which every individual has the possibility to work as discreetly as possible and as transparently as necessary. The concept we have implemented is called Activity-Based-Working and has 3 different zones: collaboration, communication and concentration. There’s something there for everyone.

This strengthens our interdisciplinary work and promotes our creativity.

Confererence room

Technology that seduces

Kitchen

Meet & greet in the kitchen

Living room

Plug & play in the living room

Working Bench

Working Bench

Scrum Raum

Scrum & Design Thinking

Library

Gathering thoughts

OUR TOOLS

Now our employees have the necessary tools not just to enrich their working day, but also to break down the boundaries to their creativity and potential.

DIGITALIZATION

  • Surface hubs
  • Surface notebooks
  • Clean desktop policy

Communication

  • Tixxt & Jabber
  • Skype4Business & GoToMeeting
  • Brown Bag Session
  • Idea workshop: reVoluDIonary

Agility

  • Scrum
  • Design Thinking
  • Nudge Management

Mobile Work

  • Mobile work
  • VPN client
  • Soft and mobile phone