Overview

No New Work without new collaboration skills

Why software-based collaboration is the foundation for the working world of tomorrow

The coronavirus pandemic has revealed a great deal: for example, how little schools and public institutions are digitized, how difficult it is for political actors to manage logistics and how vulnerable a closely interlinked global economy is. But there were also extremely positive findings: in particular, that scientists are able to develop very effective vaccines very quickly.

The world of work has also been turned on its head by the crisis. There has been a lot of talk about New Work in recent years. However, change is progressing rather slowly in the majority of companies. Even before the pandemic, many managers had considerable reservations about working from home – a rather trivial aspect of new work. The arguments: difficult to organize and detrimental to performance. When working from home became part of everyday life for millions of employees from one day to the next, especially in spring 2020, the opposite became apparent. Meetings were held with the help of collaboration tools such as MS Teams and Zoom, access to the server was possible via a VPN connection and many business applications were already in the cloud anyway. Many people also reported being able to work much more concentrated and efficiently – when they weren’t homeschooling at the same time. And all of this worked not only within a company, but also across company boundaries.

Next level enterprise content management and workflow management

It is therefore all the more surprising that some companies now want to return to the “status quo ante” as quickly as possible. At the end of July 2021, Trigema CEO Wolfgang Grupp, for example, explicitly spoke out against working from home – because people could be distracted at home and efficiency would suffer. Wolfgang Grupp also pointed out that the already privileged white collars would gain an additional advantage over the blue collars, who after all cannot work remotely. Anyone who dismisses such a question of fairness as a pretextual argument is making things a little too easy for themselves. The debate certainly needs to be held. In our view, however, it should not be misused to reinforce inertia.

Apart from that, there are a whole range of aspects that scratch a little at the beautiful home office appearance. For example, companies have adapted to the new situation incredibly quickly. However, many things were somewhat improvised – and were absolutely allowed to be. However, if the home office is to become a serious alternative in the long term (and not just remain an incentive), now is the time for a few fundamental changes to the technological infrastructure. Above all, a new enterprise content and workflow management system is required.

ECM + Workflow = xRM

Against this backdrop, it is worthwhile for companies to take a closer look at Anything Relationship Management (xRM). In contrast to established Customer Relationship Management (CRM), this not only covers relationships with customers, but also a company’s relationships with all possible stakeholders and objects: in addition to customers and suppliers, for example, employees, real estate, contracts and materials, projects and orders. Data can be recorded and documents stored for all relationships.

In addition to this enterprise content management dimension, which is also common in CRM, xRM adds a workflow dimension. The static view is thus supplemented by a dynamic view. In concrete terms, this means that for the relationships with stakeholders and objects, it is also defined which tasks are to be completed when and by whom and in what way. For example, in the case of a property that a company rents. Statically, the master data of the landlord, the rental agreement, technical drawings and utility bills are stored. A workflow might dynamically map the fact that the utility bills need to be checked and approved or that an evaluation takes place in good time before the end of the rental period. In the HR context, workflows could be defined for regular employee appraisals and their documentation or for the timely deletion of personal data.

Collaboration: no great feat with modern software

Back to New Work and working from home. Because employees have generally worked closely together in the past, a lot could be done informally. This undoubtedly had its charm – if only because of the socializing opportunities. However, it also concealed the fact that there were no clear guidelines for many processes. And it was precisely this that led to inefficiencies or much more annoying consequences.

If people are increasingly working together remotely, collaboration must be given a clear framework. This includes binding conventions, robust concepts and the right tools. For example, there must be agreement on how and where documents are stored and how a task is triggered and handed over. And everyone needs to be committed to sticking to them. Applications that compensate for typical human weaknesses by automating certain processes are particularly helpful when it comes to “sticking to it”. For example, a tool can create a standardized folder structure for each relationship and name documents consistently. Or a workflow or email is automatically sent to the next person in the process sequence whenever the previous task has been marked as “completed”. Successful collaboration is therefore anything but an art. Above all, successful collaboration is the result of a systematic approach.