Till frustration do us part

In the case of some employees, management will be happy if they leave the company at their own request. If the performance or the chemistry is not right, an end with horror is still better than the reverse. However, some employees are something of key figures in the company. These don’t necessarily have to be members of management. People who go above and beyond, are reliable and have acquired a level of expertise over the years that is second to none are invaluable to any company. Nevertheless, many decision-makers seem to have a blind spot in their management style. Instead of making an effort to keep these long-standing and capable colleagues in the best possible mood, they are often overlooked, ignored and not included in important decisions. Money often plays no role at all, although it would not occur to most companies to introduce some kind of monetary reward system for particularly value-added personnel. The good news for all the cost-cutters and cheapskates on the boardroom floor is that money is not the answer, but retention management is.

What motivates employees to stay with the company?

The answer to this question is delightfully simple and short: happiness. People who enjoy going to work every day, feel good there and can satisfy their personal needs will be happy to stay with their employer. People are basically creatures of habit. If the circumstances fit, no new professional challenge is envisaged out of a pure pioneering or adventurous spirit. Anyone who gives “professional development” as the reason for this decision during the termination interview means, loosely translated, “Because I’m not happy here (anymore).” Of course, as a human resources manager, one could now argue that the workplace does not have the main task of making its employees happy. After all, they would be adequately compensated for their performance. Retention management shows where employees and their needs can be well met and where there is still room for improvement. According to surveys, only four percent of all companies use this strategic tool. In practice, however, retention management would be quite simple: What sounds like a hypermodern buzzword from a business management manual actually means only one thing in daily implementation: communication.

Talk to me!

The core of successful employee management is the appraisal interview. Many companies do without it completely, others misuse it as a kind of disciplinary measure. Yet this instrument in particular would offer great potential for accommodating staff in small and often cost-neutral steps. The needs and wishes of long-serving employees can be very diverse: family-friendly working hours, the workplace, the immediate job itself, or training and development opportunities. Priceless: the expression of appreciation. On the other hand, treating staff with suspicion and mistrust does not create a pleasant atmosphere in which you want to stay for the long term.

Retention management in practice

Like any HR tool, this one can be professionally implemented and supported by external agencies, for example as part of a QM offensive. The most important stages are the definition of goals (e.g., reduction of employee fluctuation), the assessment of the current situation, and the implementation in practice. However, the “employee retention” project can also be carried out in a very low-threshold one-on-one meeting. As we all know, it doesn’t cost anything to ask.

Image: https://pixabay.com/de/photos/office-business-meeting-5472251/

Der Beitrag Retention management – retaining employees in the long term erschien zuerst auf agile Companies.

Everyone works with!

The trend has been going in one direction for years: A. ll should participate in the company and so far companies have always managed to do better. Driven primarily by digital technologies. When people talked about the “interactive web” in Web 2.0, apps and the Internet of Things made it much more interactive. Now there are numerous other possibilities through, among others, CloudServices. The goal of Futurework is now to adapt the workplace and work to this “hands-on culture”.

Work wherever you want (futurework)

Most of the articles on Twitter on futurework deal with the new workplace design. The articles speak of a result culture instead of a present tense culture. Under the topic: Activity based working, an “ultimate workplace” is defined, which is suitable for any type of work and in which there is a culture of trust and permanent networking. The illustration shows the idea behind the hashtag futurework and activity based working.

Futurework – a collection of office concepts?

Overall, the investigation of the hashtag shows a strong focus on room and office concepts to promote agility in the company. Sure, there is also talk of a cultural change and this is also dealt with in great detail, but mainly office concepts are evaluated. The following sentence sums up the topic very well: “The office is changing into a place of communication and networking. For this purpose, situation-oriented rooms are required that promote creative exchange or project work as well as offer retreats for concentrated and confidential work and optimally support routine activities. ” (Source Detecon ).

Is that agile?

Companies want agile employees. These should deliver high quality work, be creative, flexible and deliverable. I think the thesis that this is an important property in today’s knowledge society, I do not need to go into further. But are these new concepts really a factor in structural change in companies?
I have found many articles about concepts but have not yet found any direct case studies as to whether such a concept has really improved the work. Sure, these concepts in themselves promise really great work, but does every employee really want to work like this? To answer this question, I will conduct a case study with a company that has implemented such a concept and evaluate exactly whether and how this open space has changed the way we work.
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Der Beitrag Futurework – the agile working world? erschien zuerst auf agile Companies.

In general, this type of work is helpful to a healthy extent. Unfortunately, being a practitioner often means that you act exactly as you know it, without thinking theoretically and thinking about the effect or the exact reason. You then hear sentences like:

• “It is always done that way”,
• “I have a lot of experience with that”,
• “I know that!”
• “I’m just a practitioner”

The pragmatic practitioner

The term practitioner is often mentioned in relation to the hands-on mentality. A practitioner is the opposite of a theorist. Jeanne Moreau describes the practitioner as follows: The great practitioners do not talk, they act. Certainly there are advantages and disadvantages of being a practitioner.

In general, it is important to keep a balance between theory and practice. Even pure theorists do not achieve the desired success. It is about applying existing theoretical knowledge and one’s own experience in combination to solve a task.

Advantages of pragmatism

In general, pragmatism has its advantages. Pragmatic people make while others are still thinking, planning or considering which guidelines they have to adhere to. There is little discussion, it is done. The result is important! Pragmatists don’t get bogged down – they act!

Disadvantages of pragmatism

But where there is light, there is also shadow. The disadvantage associated with acting quickly is that possible variants are not considered or alternatives remain unchecked. They are often conventional and not very original solutions. Unfortunately, I notice that so-called “practitioners” are often very stuck in their own opinions and hardly open to new solutions. Reading books or helpful blog articles with new methods is also rejected as too theoretical. One would be a practitioner and therefore could not fall back on all kinds of documents.

Reading tip: Booksmart vs Streetsmart

The danger is that practitioners restrict themselves greatly in their own horizons. The conscious renunciation of existing knowledge and thus the restriction to one’s own knowledge is not expedient, especially in complex times. It is important to be open to new paths and not to lapse into actionism. The practitioner likes to use particularly agile methods to act on one’s own experience instead of in terms of methodology.

Leaders are prone to micromanagement

In particular, leadership should not be tried out on the “living object” (hands-on), but rather it should be treated carefully. Strategies should also be based to a certain extent on market studies and knowledge from the literature.

This is often followed by actionism among practitioners and a focus on known and essential points. As a manager, it feels like irregular little bomb impacts with the practitioner. The focus is on many small topics and the practitioner hardly sees the big picture. The practitioner looks at each topic in detail without looking at the big picture and poaches around in chat rooms and gives his opinion on every project, always focusing on a detail that is not done as he knows it.

Conclusion

It is always advisable to reflect on yourself and to find the right balance between practitioner and theorist. Of course, quick and efficient action is important, but the inclusion of existing knowledge and broadening one’s own horizons is also an important aspect. I would never call myself a practitioner or a theorist – I take the best of both worlds.

Reading tip: Generalist vs specialist

Der Beitrag Advantages and disadvantages of the “practitioner” and “hands-on mentality” erschien zuerst auf agile Companies.

I have received numerous calls from Scrum masters and project leaders as well as change managers since March 2020 – the topic was the change in work since the lockdown caused by COVID-19. Virtual work forces companies to make numerous changes and, due to falling sales, companies are primarily obliged to deliver and to bring products / services to customers quickly. There is no longer any time for long voting channels and long discussions. Companies need to act now.

I work and nobody participates!

Unfortunately, I hear the sentence from the headline very often. The employees or managers want to implement projects and customer requests quickly. However, it seems almost impossible to bring a task into the company. Each task must be coordinated extensively and described in tickets so precisely that it takes more than double the time to complete the task.

For the test subjects it seems like a fight against giants, only a tiny IT change (a few lines of code) or a project plan approval from management. The test subjects feel that every task, no matter how small, has to go through a massive approval and coordination process. But where does that come from?

Work avoidance measures

Basically, companies are structured according to controllability and control. Unfortunately, this system also requires numerous measures to avoid work. We see examples in the picture above, which I have also seen in my career as a management consultant, especially in large companies.

Unfortunately, such measures to avoid work become more and more numerous as the company grows. Examples are:

• Requirements are missing
• The business case is missing
• The boss should approve it
• I’m not responsible for this
• There is no process
• I am asking questions and confusing the applicant
• Somebody else has to do that – who don’t I know
• Who said I have to do this
• The problem needs to be described in more detail
• The ticket is incomplete
• I need approval from Department X.

Let’s talk exaggerated and imagine that we work in an organization with 12,000 employees. Exaggerated, with these sentences we could easily deny ourselves any task for 2 weeks. With every request to us, we would use one of the many work avoidance measures and let requests suffocate in the bureaucracy.

Domino effect: avoidance of work

I don’t know whether on purpose or not, but depending on the duration, it happens that an employee practices this type of avoidance. Then employees in his environment start trying to do this as well. Imagine: someone directs a task to you that you should produce a report for the Astron project. But you know that the Astron project manager avoids a lot of work and will find it difficult to give you the data. You will have to ask for 8 hours to create a report of 1 hour of effort. The project manager will ask you to get approval from the boss and ask why the report is necessary. You can prepare for a long discussion, especially since the project manager can hardly reach the boss. You don’t feel like doing it and you are subconsciously trying to avoid this yourself and ask the applicant for approval from the boss for the report: a serious domino effect

Conclusion and my tips

Such work avoidance measures are very bad for companies. It is easy to exploit governing bodies and corporate functions for such a wrong use case. This then becomes a dangerous domino effect. One by one will lose interest. It only helps to abolish such measures with the help of agile methods and to show transparently where such work avoidance is practiced. This is what managers are primarily required to do. In the end, however, the most important thing is: the mindset of the employees does not apply such measures.

Der Beitrag When companies no longer want to work – work avoidance domino effect erschien zuerst auf agile Companies.

• You are new to the company and one employee is highly praised for helping the company a lot 10 years ago. However, after getting to know each other, you notice that this employee is currently hardly worth any more and is more like a hype.
• You have an applicant who talks about numerous successful projects 10 years ago but the CV of the last 5 years is actually rather poor.

“It used to be good”

Many employees believe this sentence when they come across such employees. I often notice that old successes have a long-lasting effect on employees who have been with the company for 10-15 years and often such successes still carry great weight when changing jobs. But I see a danger:

Such employees tend to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s methods!

The last 5 years are crucial!

The IT world in particular is turning incredibly fast. Software development, for example, has been fundamentally changed by the cloud. Instead of monoliths, small micro-services are built, which are managed like a kind of orchestra and in terms of management methods such as Scrum and co. It is important to implement these new methods in the company.

I therefore believe that the successes of the last 3 and 5 years are the most important. Employees often start a quieter phase after great success and often miss new developments. There is a risk that the potential of the new technologies and methods will be missed. Especially in terms of long-life learning, this is often dangerous if the appointed messiah throws the company back 2 years rather than moving it forward.

Conclusion: opportunity for young talents!

Of course, this is a bit exaggerated but true. As a manager, I therefore like to rely on a mix of young, educated and hungry talent as well as old hands. However, I am not afraid to address current gaps in knowledge with old hands and not be blinded by old successes.

However, there is a great opportunity here for young talents, which I have also used. With my doctoral thesis on the use of technology to increase agility, I was able to assert myself as a department head against other applicants. I knew how a department can work completely virtually and how leadership works in digital space. Such insights are very new to this day and for many experienced managers still a book with seven seals.

In endangered professions, it is important to consistently develop further with the help of new IT skills and to change the job profile. For example, a clerk can use IT skills to configure the automation software or a construction worker can operate intelligent machines. As employees, we should start to take 100 percent responsibility for occupational safety #Employability, as companies can no longer assume this responsibility for employees. Nor can you rely on the educational systems in companies, you have to continue your education through active learning in your free time. A survey by Haufe already shows that more than a third of over 1,000 employees surveyed already receive further training on the weekend and in their free time.

Der Beitrag The last 5 years count – why specialists often rest on old successes erschien zuerst auf agile Companies.

During this time, I learned from executives and mentors how to scale an organization and build it up so that it can grow. It was invested, risked and won. At that time I was closely watching the leaders and trying to learn so that maybe one day I could get into such a role myself. I have been a manager myself for 8 months now and have been able to implement many of the strategies. But I was never prepared for one thing: Corona – management strategies in times of crisis.

The difference: decision-making culture instead of waiting culture!

In times of growth, I had always had the feeling that managers tend to put off particularly conflict-prone decisions. The reason was clear: the numbers are constantly increasing and we’re doing fine! There was no need to introduce too strong changes but rather to scratch the surface. I base this experience on my three years as a management consultant, during which I accompanied numerous large corporations.

What was the result? There is no decision-making culture. Questions about the future were not actively approached; there was a culture of waiting and voting.

Changes are only successful if they are supported by the entire upper management level. In times of growth, this was often reserved for new opportunities and guaranteed sales increases. Even as a normal employee, it was impossible to strive for such changes without power. I’ve seen this many times when I introduced Scrum. As a coach it was often almost impossible, but as a department head you could easily take your first steps with the help of power.

Many were not prepared for a crisis

Many managers have lapsed since Corona due to little knowledge of one extreme to the other. The employees were correspondingly insecure. Somehow you had to stick to the numbers and show that as a manager you are actively making decisions again, which you have avoided for a long time.

What I now notice more than ever: Management needs time and energy to bring about changes consistently and every day. I was often disappointed that my leadership was not doing enough for the real changes and I spend a long time in the office or home office every day just to bring about the profound changes.

Corona needs doers and decision-makers again instead of waiting and voting! Real managers with clear ideas are needed, who make decisions and also help to implement them!

My tips from 3 months of crisis management

• Take advantage of market change : Corona is restructuring the market. We were able to successfully take advantage of the new opportunities offered by cloud services and still grow.
• Crisis as an occasion : The Corona crisis was the reason to initiate further necessary and very far-reaching changes, especially the cross-departmental cooperation.
• Management is hard work : Entrepreneurial changes can only be made with “power”.
• Implementing decisions : After the decision, I actively help to implement it to the end and do not pull myself out!
• Leadership is responsibility : It is up to me as a manager to maintain processes and sales as well as employee satisfaction.
• Resistance is always there: In every change process there are winners and losers. That is why there are always certain employees who actively fight the change.
• Get everyone involved : You can’t do it alone. Get others involved and ask for help and feedback. Build a change team around you.
• Give the stage : Let others become stars in the change. Let them introduce these parts of the change for the company and make it clear that you did not do it all by yourself.
• Pull yourself out : Once you have a new body or format in place, train and document it and have someone else do it. This gives you time to tackle new change processes.

Der Beitrag Generation Y learns crisis – my experiences and recommendations for managers erschien zuerst auf agile Companies.

Let’s be honest with ourselves: It is almost impossible to work through individual tasks one after the other without being distracted. Even while I am writing this article, I am watching Netflix and answering chats on Whatsapp. No chance to write down the blog article in one piece.

The myth of multitasking

Let’s look at the job advertisements: The ideal employee should be resilient and flexible. It should therefore be capable of multitasking and, like a computer, be able to do several tasks at the same time. But it is hard to focus on several things and yet it is so difficult for us to concentrate on one thing.

We watch TV while eating and check our e-mails in meetings. Scientists at the University of Stanford already dealt extensively with the topic of multitasking in 2009. Two groups were observed in the experiment. Of course, the group was qualitatively better and faster, which tasks worked off one after the other.

However, we find it difficult to focus. Technology in particular is to blame for this and made everything quick and easy.

That’s why multitasking is bad

Studies show that multitasking releases the happiness hormone dopamine as well as cortisol (stress hormone). On the one hand we are happy that we can achieve so much and want more, but on the other hand we put ourselves under stress and at some point we can no longer really think about things. The cause: We just work things off and deliver poor quality and zero creativity

New technologies and smartphones in particular make our work much faster and leave us full of distractions. In the past, we had significantly fewer tasks, for example. 4-5 large tasks, while methods such as Scrum mean that we now handle over 100 constantly changing small tasks per week.

PS: There are a few isolated examples of people who do tasks well and in parallel. Unfortunately, there is currently no explanation why these people are capable of this.

Tips for fewer context changes in the workplace

In the following, I would like to show you my personal tips that I have collected over the past few years.

Prioritization of tasks

Instead of working on several tasks in parallel, I try to prioritize. I look at what is important and what is not and schedule tasks for myself. There is never a need to do everything at once. I help my employees with clear backlogs in Jira about what is important and what is not. We also speak to the sales department on a regular basis.

Rest periods and blockers for demanding tasks

But what to do if you need a longer time for a task. As a head of department, I have to be available at all times and can hardly bring a task to an end in peace. It simply cannot be avoided because my employees need decisions from me.

But there are tasks such as concepts or new processes that require my full concentration and time. Until recently, I learned how to write my doctoral thesis for a year. It takes some time (1h) until I was inside and then I had to at least. Write on it for 4 hours at a time.

I then inform all my employees and simply switch off the systems and messages. Sometimes it has to go without me and I only have one channel open for really important messages.

Bundling of task complexes

I try to do tasks that belong together or are very similar, as the saying goes, in one go. For me, that’s answering emails and chat messages. The advantage is that I don’t have to think in smaller messages that often and that I can avoid these distractions very well.

Working with new (agile) methods

Agile methods are made for the digital age. We learned before that timeboxing is a very simple and effective method. But creating boards for complex topics is a simple and good method of simply mapping complex topics.

Image source: Car photo created by diana.grytsku – de.freepik.com

Der Beitrag Changing context and multitasking as a challenge in the digital world of work erschien zuerst auf agile Companies.

Since 1930 numerous experts have thought about whether a 40-hour week really makes sense. Even then it was established that prosperity is strongly related to the use of machines (industrial revolution). Due to advances in technology, greatly reduced working hours are sufficient to ensure a comfortable livelihood for everyone. According to the teaching of Bergmann (NewWork), the free time could be used to do good, volunteer work or take care of yourself through a garden, etc. The credo is: Happiness and joie de vivre instead of nervous irritability and fatigue.

Study on working hours

The majority in Germany is currently working too much. Here we assume a normal 40h week. I got the numbers from the Federal Statistical Office. Over 2,000 employees were surveyed. The bottom line is that around every second person works too much.

Another survey of Xing on the future of work shows that of around 2000 employees who work 40 hours a day, more than half of the respondents would like to reduce their working hours. So there seems to be a strong urge for less work in my private life too.

Even since COVID-19, many contacts in my field have told me that you can actually do your job very well and that you currently enjoy having more free time. All of the contacts surveyed had no children and were able to plunge into free time after work. Contacts with children in particular were more inclined to extend short-time work in order to have free time after bringing up children.

Optimize unnecessary working hours

Productivity is often based on Parkinson’s law. You do 80% of the work in 20% of the time, or each work expands to the same extent as the time available to do it. I think that we spend 50% of our time in meetings and answer pretty meaningless mail chains.

With sensible software and new processes, we have optimized processes and meetings in my department so that, through more self-organization and individual decisions, the speed has increased massively and we suddenly felt 1/3 more time. So it is possible and is largely related to the optimization of time wasters and, above all, the often tough management decisions.

Incidentally, a study by Asana found that we spend 60 percent of our working time on coordination tasks. Only 27 percent remain for the work for which we were actually trained and also hired. For strategy and planning only 13 percent (source T3N ). So there is a lot of room for optimizing working hours.

Not possible everywhere

Ultimately, it depends on the type of employment. I think it’s easier to do it in office jobs and in large companies. I think that nurses and employees on nursing wards have to work for 40 hours. Because where one nurse only works 20 hours, a second one is necessary. But that’s not what this article is about.

Important : It’s not about everyone working part-time and employing more employees, but rather that we reduce less meaningful work and create more time for creative work through automation and optimization of time wasters.

Asana’s study (source T3N ) also shows that only 46 percent of employees really understand the goals and precise implementation of their work. Just as little (43%) know the company’s goals. 70% are also of the opinion that their direct superior does not understand what actually needs to be done. So it is an important management task to optimize efficiency and job completion.

The amount of work decreases

According to various sources, the work should decrease rapidly in the next few years. I noticed it back in 2015 when hordes of management consultants simulated their work in large corporations on a daily basis. Numerous sites such as “Crazy Management Consultants” or “Consulting Humor” on Instagram also have fun debates about it.

Bad news has been growing lately. Deutsche Bank wants to cut 18,000 jobs and is not alone. Siemens wants to cut 10,000, 7,000 at Volkswagen, 5,400 at Ford, 4,500 at Bayer, 4,000 at Thyssenkrupp and cable giant Leoni is also planning to cut 2,000 jobs. On the other hand, we also have good news. Volkswagen wants to create 2,000 new jobs at the same time, Siemens also wants to create around 2,500 new jobs and Thyssenkrupp also wants to create 1,000 new jobs.

You notice that there is a shift in the jobs from analog to digital jobs. Reducing working hours can be a means of maintaining full employment. It can prevent us from simply processing orders and coming up with creative solutions. I often notice that customers send me half-finished concepts under complete stress and are hardly able to accept creative solutions because they have been completely revised.

Conclusion

In addition to the fact that home office is possible, COVID-19 has also shown us that less working hours do not have to lead to less performance. An important factor is the optimization of processes and the focus on meaningful work. It remains exciting whether companies want to try this out more and more.

Der Beitrag What if we all only work 30 hours after Corona erschien zuerst auf agile Companies.

Virtual reality (VR) is a computer-generated reality with images (3D) and in many cases also sound. Mostly there are forms of interaction in VR, even if only in the sense of physical movement through the virtual world ( Gabler ). One should not confuse VR with augmented reality. This does not mean the complete creation of a virtual world but the expansion of the real world to include aspects such as Pokemon in Pokemon Go.

You need special VR glasses for implementation. VR glasses have enjoyed greater interest in society in recent years. According to a survey, 10% of 1,200 respondents have had such glasses since 2019, a further 21% can imagine buying such glasses and over a third have already tried them.

My experience: VR glasses in a private environment

Before using it in business, I also bought such glasses privately in 2019 in the form of a Playstation with VR glasses. You play there primarily and virtually climb Mount Everest or save the world from monsters of all kinds. With the motion controllers, movements such as climbing and boxing can be carried out very realistically. More than 1 million devices have already been sold, which makes Playstation the market leader in VR (around 15% gap to second and third place – HTC and Oculus – Computer base ).

• Playstation
• VR Vrille
• Motion controller

My experience: VR glasses in a business environment

VR in the B2B environment? This is definitely not yet widespread, but as statistics show, the use of VR is slowly growing based on sales. For 2020, 2 billion euros are forecast. So is VR an alternative to video conferencing in the home office?

Now I’ve bought VR glasses with some colleagues. We should try out whether we can meet there more efficiently than by video and discuss concepts and software code in a meaningful way. Above all, it was important to us to maintain personal closeness despite the ban on contacts due to Corona. In the beginning it was of course strange but we had a lot of fun and have been using it for 2 months. Nowadays my days often start with a VR meeting.

It is actually quite simple. You create an avatar and log into the VR room. Now we invite all participants and choose an appropriate room. In addition to the business room, you can meet in space or around a campfire. However, we always choose the business room. A presenter can upload a picture or video to the projector and we can discuss it.

My conclusion: It feels a lot better than a video meeting and is a great alternative. Of course everything is still at the beginning, but I am sure that it will be a great alternative to video conferencing and a part of our business world.

I imagine the future with VR meetings just like my colleagues Tobias Greff from the AWS Institute . Our idea is a virtual project manager who puts together a team on a platform for the problem and is selected according to professional expertise, verified references, star rankings or recommendations from the professional social network. The virtual team is supplemented by intelligent bots, ie assistance services with artificial intelligence designed for specific subject areas.

You write the minutes and transcribe the results. Automatically generate PowerPoint slides, Excel calculations or carry out information research on request. The team is now put together. So off to the first customer meeting and quickly with a few clicks, the outfit adjusted, because according to statistical expectations, only jeans and a shirt belong to the innovation project.

Reading tip: The digital twin

Finally: I tried the following VR glasses and recommend an Oculus Go to start, which is available for 149 euros.

• Oculus Go
• Oculus Quest
• Oculus Rift

Conclusion

VR has been a niche technology to this day and, in my opinion, only made itself better known in the private sector with the PlayStation VR. It turns out that it still has to be improved in many places in order to produce a perfect gaming experience, but it is already a lot of fun.

This required me to try VR in business in the form of meetings. With Corona in particular, we wanted an alternative to video conferencing. We were enthusiastic about the first meetings and use the few opportunities. We are currently discussing very open content that is not relevant to data protection, as we still need a secure on-premise VR solution. But for a first test, I can say that it could certainly become a part of our business world. I would appreciate it!

Image source: Business photo created by pressfoto – de.freepik.com

Der Beitrag VR meetings as an alternative to video in times of Corona erschien zuerst auf agile Companies.

Basically, my experience is that employees who hardly work in the office do hardly anything at home. In contrast, hard-working employees are just as hard-working at home. A current study, which examines almost 30,000 employees has shown that employees in the home office work an average of 4 hours more overtime per week than employees in the office. So the fear that employees will do nothing only seems to exist in the heads of managers?

Control task completion in the home office

Even with great self-organization and trust, there should be a possibility of control. To do this, you first need to neatly break the existing work down into small tasks. You have to prepare the existing work in such a way that it can be processed using methods such as Scrum and Kanban.

Think of it like eating a cake at a party. Nobody will want to bite straight into the cake because the pieces are too big. So you have to cut it into small pieces. Afterwards, guests can take small pieces and eat. As soon as they are hungry again, they eat the next piece. At some point the cake is gone. You then actively distribute the last pieces that nobody wants at the party.

In business this means that you divide ideas into projects that consist of different tasks. These are clearly described and can be processed by the employees. You can now visualize this with methods such as Scrum and Kanban. As a manager, you will always see on one board:

• What tasks are left to be done?
• What do my employees do?
• Where are we blocked?
• What’s done

You can see an example above. You can see on the board that three tasks are currently free and that your 4 employees are currently actively working on tasks 4-7. As a manager, you could take care of the acceptance of tasks 10-12 or blockers 8-9. As you can see, work is going on and nobody is resting. You should discuss the board with the team using a short daily conference call.

Conclusion

You notice that remote work is not difficult and that the completion of tasks can still be controlled. I have been working as a manager for a virtual team for more than 2 years and have excellent experience with these methods. I am always ready to say what my employees are doing and the transparency is even significantly higher than in on-site teams. The basic requirement is the division and documentation of the work as well as the visualization by a virtual board.

Tip: Read my book: SMEs in digital change at Springer Gabler or book me for a talk .

Der Beitrag How can you control remote and home office work? erschien zuerst auf agile Companies.