The workplace is changing rapidly, and the pace of the changes is constantly increasing. Chatbots support our customer service, videoconferences can take the place of business travel, and artificial intelligence helps out with data analysis. Not surprisingly, employees’ job profiles are changing as well. The half-life of knowledge keeps shortening, and core competencies for employees now include a readiness to change, and to learn.
At the same time, employees’ expectations with regard to their employers are also changing, in corresponding ways. Employees expect employers to offer them more personal freedom, greater flexibility, and less limitation to specific workplace locations. From such changes, a new balance between trust and responsibility is emerging. Strict controls and rigid office-time schedules will become things of the past. Today’s competent, committed, and entrepreneurially oriented employees are taking greater responsibility for their work than past employees did. They are also assuming greater responsibility for themselves overall.
As we become the “Leading Digital Telco”, the ways in which we collaborate are changing. At Deutsche Telekom, we call the results of this development New Work. This is about more than simply whether employees work in the office or from their homes. It’s also about the essence of our work – about whether it is meaningful, and of use to society, and about how it helps take us, as a company, toward our common success.
Our journey toward a new, more flexible, more intelligent, more individual workplace began over a decade ago. Rather than focusing on structures, this journey emphasizes attitudes and relationships – including relationships among ourselves and with our customers – and is directed at a changed understanding of what leadership should be. Such topics are also a central focus of our corporate culture, which we are developing jointly, as a Living Culture. This culture supports a transformation process that calls on employees to be willing to change and acquire new skills. This, in turn, presents challenges – challenges that we are addressing with comprehensive skills management and precisely tailored training options. Our Guiding Principle “Act with respect and integrity,” for example, entails that everyone should feel like they belong and be given the opportunity to capture their full potential. To achieve this goal, we support our managers and employees, for example, with training courses on all aspects of diversity.
We examine the transformation of the workplace in detail with our “NewWork@Telekom” magazine, which we publish several times per year. In the issue “From today to tomorrow” (only available in German) from October 2022, we explored how our labor market will change and identified the cultural and technological drivers that will characterize our jobs of tomorrow, among other topics.
We also examined changes in the world of work during the reporting year in our New Work podcast “Frohes Schaffen. Neues Schaffen” (Pleasant work. New work.- only available in German). In it, we talked about what it means to work in a digital world, what new opportunities are arising in the labor market, and how competencies and job profiles are changing.
Currently, the framework for our collaboration is defined by five pillars. We invite and expect our employees, in the context of their teams, to help flesh out the specific details of how this framework is applied. With this approach, we can combine the best of both worlds – the physical and the virtual worlds, or the analog and digital worlds.
To this end, and working in cooperation with the Group Works Council, we have produced the New Work manifesto. It serves as the basis for interaction characterized by trust and respect.
Our Digital@Work program facilitates our employees’ collaboration – with suitable tools and technologies. Also, we are continuously working to make the new world of work visible through the design and further optimization of our office spaces. We want our offices to invite and inspire employees to collaborate, interact, and carry out hybrid meetings and workshops. Throughout our locations in Germany and abroad, we are setting up spaces for digital collaboration and creativity in which employees can work together on projects and across units.
The workplace is changing rapidly, and the pace of the changes is constantly increasing. Chatbots support our customer service, videoconferences can take the place of business travel, and artificial intelligence helps out with data analysis. Not surprisingly, employees’ job profiles are changing as well. The half-life of knowledge keeps shortening, and core competencies for employees now include a readiness to change, and to learn.
At the same time, employees’ expectations with regard to their employers are also changing, in corresponding ways. Employees expect employers to offer them more personal freedom, greater flexibility, and less limitation to specific workplace locations. From such changes, a new balance between trust and responsibility is emerging. Strict controls and rigid office-time schedules will become things of the past. Today’s competent, committed, and entrepreneurially oriented employees are taking greater responsibility for their work than past employees did. They are also assuming greater responsibility for themselves overall.
As we become the “Leading Digital Telco”, the ways in which we collaborate are changing. At Deutsche Telekom, we call the results of this development New Work. This is about more than simply whether employees work in the office or from their homes. It’s also about the essence of our work – about whether it is meaningful, and of use to society, and about how it helps take us, as a company, toward our common success.
Our journey toward a new, more flexible, more intelligent, more individual workplace began over a decade ago. Rather than focusing on structures, this journey emphasizes attitudes and relationships – including relationships among ourselves and with our customers – and is directed at a changed understanding of what leadership should be. Such topics are also a central focus of our corporate culture, which we are developing jointly, as a Living Culture. This culture supports a transformation process that calls on employees to be willing to change and acquire new skills. This, in turn, presents challenges – challenges that we are addressing with comprehensive skills management and precisely tailored training options. Our Guiding Principle “Act with respect and integrity,” for example, entails that everyone should feel like they belong and be given the opportunity to capture their full potential. To achieve this goal, we support our managers and employees, for example, with training courses on all aspects of diversity.
We examine the transformation of the workplace in detail with our “NewWork@Telekom” magazine, which we publish several times per year. In the issue “From today to tomorrow” (only available in German) from October 2022, we explored how our labor market will change and identified the cultural and technological drivers that will characterize our jobs of tomorrow, among other topics.
We also examined changes in the world of work during the reporting year in our New Work podcast “Frohes Schaffen. Neues Schaffen” (Pleasant work. New work.- only available in German). In it, we talked about what it means to work in a digital world, what new opportunities are arising in the labor market, and how competencies and job profiles are changing.
Currently, the framework for our collaboration is defined by five pillars. We invite and expect our employees, in the context of their teams, to help flesh out the specific details of how this framework is applied. With this approach, we can combine the best of both worlds – the physical and the virtual worlds, or the analog and digital worlds.
To this end, and working in cooperation with the Group Works Council, we have produced the New Work manifesto. It serves as the basis for interaction characterized by trust and respect.
Our Digital@Work program facilitates our employees’ collaboration – with suitable tools and technologies. Also, we are continuously working to make the new world of work visible through the design and further optimization of our office spaces. We want our offices to invite and inspire employees to collaborate, interact, and carry out hybrid meetings and workshops. Throughout our locations in Germany and abroad, we are setting up spaces for digital collaboration and creativity in which employees can work together on projects and across units.