New Work: principles, areas for action and leadership

The term goes back to the social philosopher Frithjof Bergmann, who defined independence, freedom and participation in the community as central values. Globalisation, automation, digitalisation, academisation, the competition for skilled workers and increasing economic complexity have given his ideas new weight in a changed context.

Companies are looking for solutions amid the tensions of globalisation, digitalisation, demographics, knowledge transfer and climate change. Within the organisation, the digitalisation of business processes, new value chains and the changed values and expectations of employees and managers call for new impulses for management, collaboration and leadership.

In the relevant environments, target markets are volatile and in some cases subject to disruptive change, production cycles are getting shorter, and classic strategic planning is reaching its limits. More of the same is no longer enough. What is needed is new thinking and options for action beyond long-established self-assurance: a clearly communicated vision of the future, a corporate and leadership culture that enables genuine innovation, and people management that focuses on the strengths of the workforce.

A wide range of topics is associated with New Work, which can be arranged on two levels. The macro context covers social and economic conditions such as VUCA, global interconnectedness, digitalisation, labour law, the minimum wage, basic income, the welfare state, the economy for the common good and conscious capitalism.

The micro context is about shaping the individual company: self-organisation, agility, incentive systems, democratisation within the company, diversity, error culture, learning architectures, job sharing, talent management, workplace design, remote work, co-working, design thinking, corporate health, as well as purpose-driven leadership and the learning organisation. The breadth of this list shows that New Work is not a single instrument.

For work in organisations, these topics can be condensed into five principles going back to Väth (2019): promoting innovation and a positive error culture, personal responsibility and involvement, purpose-driven leadership, the learning organisation, and social responsibility.

The first principle assumes that the future is shaped with curiosity and confidence. Organisations should literally create spaces in which they test new methods of collaboration, architectural concepts, leadership models and production processes. Anyone who tries something new makes mistakes. This calls for a culture of imperfection, defined zones of error tolerance and psychological safety instead of a culture of fear. New insights unfold their value when they are shared. Organisations therefore benefit from active interface management and intensive networking between managers, teams and departments.

Participation sometimes leads to decisions being delayed rather than taken. So that organisations remain capable of action, the second principle deliberately promotes the self-responsibility of managers and employees. New Work organisations establish models of self-organisation and operational self-regulation at different levels. Using suitable methods is not enough for this. What is required is conscious engagement and a corresponding attitude on the part of everyone involved: leadership rather than management.

Money is a decisive factor in organisations. New Work therefore extends individual and collective budget authority and thus genuine financial responsibility for one’s own decisions. In addition, there are financial participation models, because ownership is a strong motivator for responsibility: employees share collectively in the success or become co-owners of the organisation individually.

The third principle is purpose-driven leadership. Every organisation serves a purpose, a form of value creation, and New Work organisations involve their employees in conscious, structured processes to find and develop this purpose. They deploy employees according to their strengths and needs, can clearly name their economic and cultural value creation in addition to the financial, and can answer the “what for?” question at any time, whether regarding portfolio, strategy, organisation or technology.

The fourth principle, the learning organisation, combines learning architectures for collective development with continuous self-renewal. Mechanisms of self-reflection include the “healthy” discarding of outdated or dysfunctional arrangements. Decision-making paths are adapted to requirements, and collective decisions are part of this too.

The fifth principle, social responsibility, covers sustainable and ecological business practices, regional engagement in society, science, technology or culture, and transparency towards all stakeholders. This includes fair tax practices, fair dealings with partners, suppliers and customers, and openness about one’s own misconduct.

Anyone wishing to establish a New Work culture works in five fields at once: strategy, organisation, people, leadership and culture. This results in eight tasks: drawing an attractive vision of the future, developing future viability, promoting organisational learning, leading with purpose, managing work-life blending, allowing self-responsibility, shaping agile collaboration and managing ambidexterity.

People and companies need attractive visions of the future, especially after periods of crisis. An authentic, desirable vision of the future that takes the emotions in the company seriously gives collaborative processes a guiding orientation for action. In difficult phases it acts like a lighthouse and helps in dealing with complexity. Well communicated and operationalised, it makes clear to individual employees the contribution and meaning of their work and sets tangible performance incentives.

Future viability requires corporate management that is less concerned with increasing performance and operational excellence than with the right conditions for adaptation and the capacity for change. Managers must keep an eye on changes in the environment and bring them into line with the structures and routines of the organisation. Their primary task shifts from maintaining regular operations to ensuring disruption, deviation and constant questioning of the chosen path. This includes methods and models that promote circular thinking in non-linear contexts.

New Work calls for more democratic structures in organisations. Transparent involvement that combines the development of organisational goals with employees’ personal goals strengthens the organisation. Error tolerance is promoted within a defined framework.

Change and adaptation have no easily defined start and end points. A linear understanding of change, carried by the hope that everything will be fine in the end, has had its day. Control and steering are replaced by agility and resilience, with which organisations deal continuously, appropriately and proactively with changing requirements.

Agile methods alone are not enough for this. An organisation is agile and capable of innovation if it has the competence to recognise uncertainty about a required solution and the path to it, and to use agile ways of working for precisely these challenges in a targeted and skilful way. This includes the ability to build up or dismantle structures as the situation requires that allow and support agile ways of working.

Ambidexterity, literally two-handedness, describes the organisational ability to manage today’s business efficiently and continuously optimise it (exploitation) while at the same time recognising potential and developing innovations (exploration). Leadership manages the balance between the two sides and the paradoxes associated with it: in resource allocation, in workplaces and working conditions for the employees of the core business and of the internal innovation wing, and in their structural coupling.

Which way of working fits depends on two variables: the degree of uncertainty in the relevant environments and the uncertainty within the organisation, that is, the difficulty of planning work processes. If both are low, efficient working is called for, with the optimisation of existing processes and products and the management of customer relationships. If both are high, agile working, agile methods and new ideas for unusual customer expectations are needed.

Rudolf Wimmer (2019) points out that agile structures, in which those involved take on essential leadership tasks through self-organisation, cannot be extended to the entire organisation in long-established organisations. He calls it a fallacy that agile frameworks dissolve essential leadership tasks and automate steering without hierarchy in team-based processes. Conscious, structured engagement with developments in the relevant environments remains an essential leadership task.

The principles of New Work touch on corporate culture. transformis understands culture as the complex of undecidable decision premises: fundamental convictions, beliefs shared as a matter of course, values, and ritual patterns of communication and behaviour. They strongly shape the coordination of behaviour and elude direct influence. Culture relates to experience, that is, to the past. It has a preserving effect and can prevent innovation (cf. Grubendorfer 2016).

A culture of imperfection or of self-responsibility therefore does not come about simply by talking about it. The work focuses on the formal structure, that is, decidable premises such as programmes, communication channels or people. The culture comments on these changes in a way that cannot be predicted. A situational approach makes sense, one that observes the cultural effects of each intervention and takes them into account in the next step.