Soccer, snacks, sabbatical? Modern working requires more!


Dr. Manfred Ziegler
CEO, founder and shareholder
of conzima GmbH.

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If you click through job advertisements these days, you sometimes get the impression that you have accidentally landed on the website of a wellness hotel. There is talk of yoga classes or fridges full of free smoothies. Snacks and lunch are included, as are the fitness room, weekly massages and a sabbatical to find yourself. Is this what employees value these days? Can companies only attract employees with such offers?

It’s good to question established structures. My team at conzima and I notice this time and again when we support companies with restructuring. But you don’t have to wait until there’s a crisis to analyze the status quo, quite the opposite – standing still is a step backwards! This is especially true today, when the world is constantly changing thanks to digitalization and globalization. And it applies in particular to the labor market, where roles have been reversed in recent years: Today, it is no longer the employers who call the shots, but employees and future employees. They are the ones who can decide which company they want to stay with and for how long. And on a global level.

This increases competition between employers – and leads to the job advertisements mentioned above. Employers use incentives to make themselves more attractive to (potential) employees. They have copied this from the big players in Silicon Valley. Google, for example, has offices with slides, sofas, go-karts and the odd ball pit. Facebook serves free meals in restaurants and provides bicycles so that employees can cycle around the company campus.

The reasons why companies introduce such incentives are interesting: They have realized that they need to think holistically! A working world that is constantly changing requires constant learning. It requires employees who are eager to learn and open to new things.

And this is exactly where incentives come into play: they not only make the company more attractive. If there are free meals, snacks and smoothies, employees don’t have to worry about their lunch. Instead, they can focus on their work. Activities such as slides, yoga classes and table tennis matches provide variety and encourage employees to develop the very skills that will be increasingly in demand in the future: Creativity, a willingness to perform, a quick grasp of things and organizational skills. We know this from ourselves: after a walk in the lunch break, you simply come back to work fresher and more alert. Weekends, vacations and sabbaticals follow the same principle, only bigger.

In order to enable employees to make the best use of their skills even without a sabbatical, Google, Facebook and the like make working very flexible: there are neither fixed working hours nor fixed workplaces. Employees are free to decide when and where they want to work. Incidentally, both are also among the top five wishes of working people in Germany, as a 2019 survey by the industry association Bitkom makes clear. A new study by DAK shows that not only employees benefit from this, but also employers: due to the coronavirus pandemic, more than 50% of companies in Germany have increased the option of working from home using digital working methods in leaps and bounds in recent months. This has paid off: according to the study, almost one in four employees say they are able to work more productively when working from home. Employees also feel less stressed, which benefits employers both in the short and long term.

A study by the Stepstone job exchange has shown that companies with flat hierarchies are perceived as significantly more innovative by their employees.

That shows: If you take a closer look, you can learn a lot more from Silicon Valley than smoothies, snacks and sabbaticals. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we have to adopt all of this. Rather, I would like to inspire people to constantly rethink and question their own work structures. Because only if we ourselves are open to new things and are constantly learning can we as an employer also establish this for our employees. For me, this is modern working – and the basic requirement for a company to move with the times in order to still be successful on the market in 20 years’ time.

I look forward to your comment

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