Digitalization at Work: Major Upheavals in the World of Work

Location-independent work has moved from the exception to the norm over the past few years. For some companies this was the proverbial wake-up call and came with a surge of activity. A large number of other organizations, by contrast, were confronted with this future unprepared.

Many businesses in the offline world have had an intensive look into that future: people no longer want or are able to travel every day into the concrete, steel and glass castles of the inner cities to do their shopping. Some small restaurants and mom-and-pop shops never reopened because delivery services took their place. And gyms are finding that customers who got used to working out at home come by less often.

If you look at the companies that reinvented themselves quickly despite initial disorientation, two lessons become apparent. First: organizations can move faster than they ever thought possible. Second: using technology across the entire organization — administration, sales and legal — pays off after just a few days when teams work in a distributed way. Because nothing presents an organization with greater difficulty than process chains that suddenly end in nowhere, because the people responsible cannot be reached or documents can no longer be found.

Flexible offices for flexible work

Managers of companies that have gone through a period of rethinking will have to face the question of whether teams must necessarily come together in the same office in order to work effectively — or whether the occasional meeting in the office should be the norm rather than the exception. The question is especially pressing for anyone who has spent a productive working day in quiet office space without having to reach for earplugs and headphones.

The answering machine should once stand up to email

For those who doubt whether video calls can ever replace a face-to-face meeting, remember: the defenders of recorded voice messages once said that emails could never capture the tone and spirit of a message on the answering machine. The rest is history.

The office creates relationships, but not necessarily more productivity

Managers are increasingly willing to accept that their teams no longer have to show up in an office just to demonstrate that they are working. Many have discovered that the productivity boost from fewer social interruptions more than makes up for the loss of camaraderie. This does not mean the end of the office, but it likely means a future in which leaders are more willing to let their people work from home some of the time.

Build software for team communication, reduce presence culture

Companies find it hard to give up their presence cultures overnight. Precisely because the current guard of managers reached their positions under the aegis of presence culture, its complete abolition is still at least one manager generation away. Just as humans go through different stages of development, so do companies — and each stage requires a change in existing patterns of behavior, especially among leaders.

Monday morning meeting against the rest of the world

New developments in the world and in the markets arrive at ever shorter intervals, ambiguous at first and then at high speed and often simultaneously. Against this force of constantly rising waves of innovation, the conventional dikes of team communication — the Monday morning meeting or the quarterly performance review in the executive office — are long since unsuitable.

Let's cast off, we're taking off

New tools are needed to deal with grown challenges. Proven tools are not useless for that; they just need to be upgraded. A telephone system is a proven means of communication — but if it is statically tied to a location, it is only of limited use. Make the telephony IP-capable and calls can be answered directly on the computer with little effort and standard software.

Reply to all was yesterday

Softphones and IP telephones should be complemented with strong tools for internal communication. Not every small piece of information is suited to the entire email distribution list, including the executive and supervisory boards. The telephone, too, is not a good way to distribute information to a wider group — unless your people have a lot of time.

Electronically into the neighboring office

This is exactly what communication services such as Slack and Teams are for. They make it possible to share information and documents with the team. Members access them when time allows or when the information is actively sought. The board can get a picture at any time without throwing the whole company into an uproar with a single phone call. The integrated video software also replaces the short walk to the neighboring office and makes face-to-face coordination location-independent.

Collaborative work

It all starts with the (collaborative) word.

This is especially true for knowledge work, even from home. Collaborative writing describes projects in which several people create texts together. In this way, even authors who do not know each other can work on a text together. An ideal concept, you might think — and yet, in Germany, editing documents collaboratively and ideally in parallel is not yet a matter of course.

Dokument_final_final_3.docx is just the beginning of the end

Too often you are confronted with a never-ending series of emails and Word documents — with changes and changes to the changes, all of which have to be distributed and discussed iteratively in conferences lasting several hours. Witnesses to these excesses are file names like Dokument_final_22.docx or Dokument_final_final_3.docx. Only lawyers can top this madness, imposing their own naming conventions on every file and adding still more confusion to the document jungle.

Parallel word processing is no longer Star Wars

This madness could be avoided with word processing that lets several people edit documents simultaneously or asynchronously — preferably directly in the browser, without installation effort and training for new versions. That gives those responsible the chance to view the status of the work at any time, without the usual surprises and rounds of revision at the end. Almost all providers of office software now offer good options for collaboration.

Digital signature: the unloved child suddenly finds affection

The digital signature is the unloved child of the offline legal profession.

For a long time the digital signature received little attention, because people preferred to print out paper to sign it, then scan it and distribute it by email. Traditionalists add the trip to the post office to complete the squaring of the circle.

Apart from paper mills, only a few companies benefit from ink on paper

A lot of work for a process that a digital signature can handle more easily and efficiently. But digital also means actively engaging with new technology — and then there is the tiresome topic of data protection, which seems to cling to technology questions. For many people these are too many question marks, despite obvious advantages.

Proven technology in almost new bottles

The digital signature is not a phenomenon of recent years. Since its legal introduction in 2014 through the eIDAS Regulation, it has been incorporated into national law and has the same legal effect as a handwritten signature. The underlying technology even dates back to the 1980s, when the internet was still used mostly by the military. Even so, it long received little attention.

Contracts everyone can access

The digital signature is now enjoying an unprecedented upswing. When authorized signatories or managing directors are hard to reach from home, sending documents by post means only limited ability to act. The digital signature simplifies the process significantly: a digitally signed document does not have to be stored in print but can be filed centrally — accessible to everyone who has to work with the contracts and the agreements they contain. For how electronic signatures work and where they are legally valid, see the guide to the electronic signature.

Centralized digital document management for decentralized teams

Central is the new decentralized.

That brings us to the next hallmark of successful companies: central document management for decentralized teams. A central document structure with a working permissions system guarantees every employee with the right authorization access to the documents they need for their daily work — even from home.

Document storage is good, but it should be accessible to everyone

Decentralized storage means, in case of doubt, local storage on office computers that would no longer be accessible when work is distributed again. Not to mention data security when storing documents on local hard drives.

Shared documents mean shared work

Experience shows that in successful organizations, information can be shared with different internal teams without friction to keep processes running. A document distributed by email does not meet this requirement, because parallel changes by different users can overlap and several teams end up doing the same work at once.

Contract software, to the rescue!

For many people, central document storage has become an integral part of private life. In everyday working life, its introduction is often only just beginning. But it is already obvious to many: once you have found your way around the jungle of boxes and drives, the benefits are clear.

A document repository reaches its limits with contracts

Yet there is a danger here. A document repository is very well suited to conventional text documents and presentations. But try to use it for contract filing and you quickly reach its limits — especially when organizations with high contract volumes and various templates try to manage and track deadlines, clauses used and legal risks. When old contracts need to be replaced by side letters or new contracts, you quickly face a mammoth task.

Good end, good software

It is therefore wise to rely on specialized contract software early, so that such problems never arise in the first place. One provider for this is top.legal, among others.

top.legal is agreement software for collaborating on and managing contracts. It helps companies agree on contracts faster while gaining deep insight into contract data. The AI-supported software offers contract creation and negotiation as well as a digital signature, and saves companies up to 90 percent of the time they otherwise spend on contracts. Its smooth, design-oriented user interface makes top.legal especially well suited to fast-growing organizations.