This article was also published in faktor magazine.
It's the same picture in many offices: deserted rooms and empty desks. Almost one in two professionals in Germany now works from home* - at least a few days a week. But what does this mean for companies and their employees? And how can work be organized when face-to-face contact is missing?
There we are, sitting in our own four walls, trying to juggle home office, homeschooling and childcare - an energy-sapping task. Home offices, frowned upon by many companies before the pandemic, became the only way to work overnight. Acting on the fly was the only way to get through the crisis - without much preparation or onboarding. For many, it was a leap into the deep end.
Anyone who thought that after the initial flurry of activity many of the hurdles had already been overcome with the introduction of mobile workplaces was soon proven wrong. No sooner had half of the German workforce arrived at the home office than new problems arose: How can we effectively drive projects and collaborate without face-to-face meetings? How can we organize ourselves without losing sight of the big picture? It was also new to many employers that employees could no longer do their daily work at a stretch, but had to be flexible to accommodate their children.
There was understanding. Many things became possible. But what will our daily work routine look like after the pandemic? Will we fall back into old patterns or will we use the new insights to create a different work culture in Germany? The desire for a mix of presence work, home office and more flexible working hours has clearly increased on the employee side, while the picture on the entrepreneur side is somewhat more differentiated - depending on how successful one has been in mastering the challenges of decentralized working.
And what does EWM do for my personal task management?
Enterprise Work Management allows you to structure your personal task management in a way that best suits your needs. It gives you clarity about your personal to-do's. It eliminates 99% of all gaps so you don't forget, overlook or miss any deadlines.
You can create to-do lists and sort them according to your personal preferences. You can also assign tasks to specific topics so you can see what needs to be done in each area at a glance.
Enterprise Work Management really comes into its own when many people are working together. By using it in teams, you can significantly reduce the amount of communication and coordination required.
You can see which tasks are assigned to which team members and keep track of all deadlines. You can organize tasks into workflows, assign them to your team members, edit or comment on them, and receive notifications when the status of a task changes.
As a new-work company, we benefited from the fact that home office options and flexible working hours have been the norm at Xtentio for years. Without any downtime and with little effort, all employees moved to the home office. Decentralized online tools for task management, work and goal management, and collaboration were already in place because we had a sustainable and well-functioning enterprise work management system in place before Corona.
"Enterprise Work Management solutions like Asana or Monday quickly create value for the company."
Heiko SĂŒthoff, Chief Strategy Officer Xtentio GmbH
But what does Enterprise Work Management (EWM) actually mean?
Basically, it describes rules, processes and solutions that can be used to organize collaborative work on projects throughout an organization. A key challenge of "remote work" is the daily coordination of goals, capacities and tasks, because our way of communicating changes radically when team members are no longer working together on-site. In the office, everyone has the ability to brief colleagues by "walking around," assigning tasks and checking in on the status of ongoing projects. But when people are not together, this disorganized flow of information becomes a constant burden: phone calls, video meetings, chat histories, emails, reports, minutes, and so on. The larger the team, the lower the productivity when the flood of messages constantly distracts from the work at hand.
In a decentralized organization, Enterprise Work Management helps reduce this communication and coordination effort. Tasks, information and goals are centrally organized and made transparent to everyone involved. Each employee has access to his or her personal area within the EWM solution and sees his or her pending tasks, which he or she can manage in a to-do list. He also sees how his work contributes to the common goals - dependencies are visualized and the big picture becomes transparent for each individual team member.
We now use Enterprise Work Management for all our internal processes and to manage our customer projects. It has become our central place for task and goal management, and we no longer want to do without it. In addition, the current solutions on the market place great emphasis on good usability - even colleagues and customers without a great affinity for IT have quickly come to know and appreciate the essential functions.
Enterprise Work Management - our practical experience
Do you want to take your company into the future with a well-functioning Enterprise Work Management? Then you can benefit from our experience. We can show you how to find a solution that is perfectly tailored to your organization.