The "New Normal" in Family Businesses, Part 3: Paradigm Shift
How is the Corona pandemic changing our corporate and working world? In a "backward forecast", we look for initial answers. Concrete. Creative. And guiding action for today. Here is Part 3 on the topic: Changing the minds of employees and managers.
As the next agenda item of our Supervisory Board meeting in summer 2022 The paradigm shift that we want to see completed in the behavior of the team and especially our managers by the beginning of 2022 is: "Out of crisis-survival mode - into future-shaping mode."
Core competencies and innovations
It still fascinates me today how quickly and consistently we switched to emergency mode in March 2020. But I am even more amazed at how long and rocky the road back to working beyond ad hoc crisis mode is. We constantly find that routines, standards, rules and other norms are no longer useful or practical.
Over the past 12 months, we have taken a very close look at our proven core competencies in our Corporate Innovation Lab, which was established in summer 2020. I would not have thought that in this way - and consistently building on our strengths - we have quickly come up with an impressive number of new business model ideas. A first, promising idea has already been fleshed out and is now in the pilot phase. It's fantastic to see how constructively and naturally our employees here work together with our main customer in mixed teams across organizational boundaries and time zones!
Paradigm shift with rituals and ideas
We also wanted to underscore our paradigm shift with new, social-distancing-compliant rituals, routines and symbols, which we introduced step by step in our organization. Roll calls at the start of every shift on the shop floor are still as taboo as most of the trade shows, conventions and major events that we would have automatically gone to in the past. Today, we start the day with virtual team breakfasts. And even on the shop floor, all of our employees now willingly use their personal smartphones to stay in touch.
We have introduced a virtual exchange for improvement ideas that is open to all employees. In the virtual idea room, improvement approaches and thoughts can be posted, viewed, explained and enriched. So much for post-its being the future in innovation management! We have often been surprised by how constructively and productively ideas are developed in the virtual room. We particularly like the fact that hierarchy plays a subordinate role. It's the better idea that counts. It doesn't matter who contributed it.
Spatial distance and customer trust
I particularly enjoy being invited more and more often by other managers and employees - even from other locations and countries - to the virtual coffee break. Here, we discuss more and more topics "in passing" as we used to at the coffee machine.
But we need to understand even better how we can secure and develop our customer relationships in the long term, largely without being present on site. Virtual design thinking workshops, virtual factory tours with the customer, product testing at the same time at the customer and supplier with virtual support are just a few examples of our efforts to maintain a high level of customer proximity despite a high physical distance.
We are constantly learning to build trust virtually and to nurture it. And we have also learned to appreciate one major advantage of virtualization: without the expense of travel, appointments can be scheduled much more quickly; participants feel noticeably more available.
The investments in the infrastructure required for this as well as in the skills of our team still seem to us to make much more sense than making business travel agencies and aviation companies big again. Against this backdrop, we have also held long and intensive discussions on how we intend to deal with the business consequences of the crisis in the medium term. We also took a close look at whether we had wisely reallocated our travel, trade show and event budgets last September in the interests of our customer relationships. For the time being, however, we are leaving them at the "new normal" level.
Employers and improvements
I am somewhat frustrated by the fact that we have been discussing adjustments to our employee processes for more than half a year - and how difficult we are finding it to release and implement the extensive improvement measures. Nevertheless, we have probably changed our working time and work location models in production and administration more in the last 12 months than in the entire 12 years before that.
Particularly when it comes to recruiting new specialists and managers, we are noticing that as a typical "hidden champion" from the provinces, we are getting better and better at reducing our location disadvantage compared to metropolitan regions. Our attractiveness as an employer is developing very positively!
As, by the way, did interdisciplinary collaboration, which we had always found difficult in the past. We were finally able to leave the old-fashioned silo thinking of the past behind us. The team spirit that has long been invoked now finally seems to have arrived in everyday working life. In particular, we haven't had to put up with political games or power struggles between individual departments for quite some time.
Leadership culture and data
The introduction of "micro-feedbacks", which we introduced at the end of every web conference or telephone conference just three months after the start of the Corona shutdown, certainly contributed to this. Since then, we have been using the resulting data base very consistently to prepare our staff appraisals as managers. The boost in quality and depth that we have been able to achieve in this area over the past few months is remarkable.
Nevertheless, the effective use of the assessment data and, above all, the empathetic handling of the resulting performance transparency currently still represent one of the greater challenges for our managers. All of them should therefore have completed their individual coaching program by the end of the year.
But things are moving forward: Increasingly, our managers have internalized that they should always act consciously and firmly as active ambassadors and guardians of our value base. More and more of them are taking the lively discussion from the management meetings to their teams and are very committed to doing their part for the good of the company as a whole - and "inciting" their employees to do so.
(to be continued)
Authors:
Christian Schiede has been advising and assisting entrepreneurial families and family businesses to strengthen cohesion, increase competitiveness and secure value since 2003. Contact: www.schiede.com; schiede@shpadvisors.com
Bastian Schneider has been helping entrepreneurs and management teams strengthen their brands from within and lead their organizations and businesses into the future from this perspective since 2000. In more than 30 industries. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Contact: www.brandleadership.ch; bastian.schneider@brandleadership.ch
