Digi-cultural mindset

With this chapter, we want to provide a reading experience on how digitalization not only evokes a technical transformation but is also strongly related to a company's culture. Talking about digital transformation, there is more to consider than alignment between IT and business functions. We want to arouse interest in the reader to discover their organization's value system and provide triggers toward the development of a digi-cultural mindset. We will dive deeper into the stages of change and provide a target vision with ideas on how to master a transformation journey. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.

New Work Poses New Challenges-The Importance of Work Design Competencies Revealed in Cluster Analysis.

The continuous transformation process in the world of work, intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, is giving employees more scope to shape their own work. This scope can be experienced as a burden or as a resource for employees. Work design competencies (WDC) describe employees' experience of their scope for design. Our study draws on existing datasets based on two Germany-wide studies. We used hierarchical cluster analyses to examine patterns between WDC, the age of employees (range: 18-71 years), the amount of weekly work time working from home (WFH), and work ability. In total, the data of N = 1232 employees were analyzed, and 735 of them participated in Study 1. To test the validity of the clusters, we analyzed data from N = 497 employees in Study 2. In addition, a split-half validation was performed with the data from Study 1. In both studies, three clusters emerged that differed in age and work ability. The cluster with the highest mean of WDC comprised employees that were on average older and reported a higher mean of work ability. Regarding WFH, no clear patterns emerged. The results and further theoretical and practical implications are discussed. Overall, WDC appear to be relevant to work ability and, in a broader sense, to occupational health, and are related to sociodemographic factors such as age.

Does Remote Work Make People Happy? Effects of Flexibilization of Work Location and Working Hours on Happiness at Work and Affective Commitment in the German Banking Sector.

(1) Background: In view of the advancing digitalization of the German banking sector, offering remote work can be an opportunity for banks to meet changing customer and employee needs at the same time. It allows flexible consultations at changing locations and, due to the high degree of autonomy, it also increases motivation, meaningfulness, happiness at work, and commitment. (2) Methods: This study used a quasi-experimental design to investigate how remote work affects happiness at work and affective commitment among employees in a German public bank. Therefore, two groups of customer advisors were examined, who work either remotely (N = 32) or stationary (N = 110) at similar tasks. (3) Results: The group comparisons show significantly higher values overall on three of the investigated four happiness dimensions ("meaningfulness", "self-actualization", and "community professional") for employees in the remote group. Commitment also differs, as employees in the remote group show significantly stronger commitment. The quantitative results were confirmed by qualitative interviews. (4) Conclusions: By investigating the positive effects of remote working, this study shows new findings on what is likely to be a growing design form of New Work in the future. The study provides evidence that self-selected work environments and working hours offer an opportunity to make work more conducive to happiness-even in a sector that still undergoes significant shifts.

Impact of Telecommuting on Job Satisfaction and Productivity of Workforce

Purpose: The last decade has encountered a massive increase in work from a culture in organizations. It is considered that this culture allows employees to manage their tasks more flexibly. The current situation of COVID-19 has majorly impacted the traditional systems of the workplace. One of these is allowing employees to work remotely. There have been constant debates on how the culture of telecommuting or working at home affects employees' job satisfaction and perceived productivity. This study attempts to analyze and establish an association between various ethnographic job characteristics and Job Satisfaction & perceived productivity of employees when working remotely. Design/Approach: The data is collected using a self-administered questionnaire The sample is collected from the full-time working professionals and interns working in different sectors with different ethnographies. The data for both of these categories have been analyzed separately using SPSS and MS-Excel. Findings: The analyses results indicated a significant and robust correlation of several characteristics with Job Satisfaction and perceived productivity. Originality: This study specifically aims to include diverse ethnographic factors like individual characteristics of people working remotely/telecommuting. Such factors have not been analyzed previously, which adds value to this research and hugely impacts the findings of previous studies.

Organizational Sustainability Identity: ‘New Work’ of Home Offices and Coworking Spaces as Facilitators

Increasingly, firms need to cope with challenges related to sustainability and ecological transformation while also experiencing an ongoing transformation by implementing New Work forms, a trend even more accelerated by the Covid 19 pandemic. The current study submits the concept of an ‘Organizational Sustainability Identity’ (OSI). It represents a firm's holistic inclination toward sustainability and the ecological transformation. New Work, often understood to advance work satisfaction, creativity, and entrepreneurship might particularly facilitate the evolvement of an OSI, such as by providing more autonomous and humane work while lowering CO2 emissions. We systematically examine New Work related to home offices, coworking spaces, and hybrid multilocal work at the backdrop of supporting the construction of an OSI. In essence, New Work can contribute to the evolvement of an OSI by improving humane work, bridging factual activities that reduce CO2 emissions, and especially by supporting social interactions which facilitate the construction of a shared identity.

Linking real estate data with entrepreneurial ecosystems: Coworking spaces, funding and founding activity of start-ups.

This data article describes a panel dataset that combines flexible office space market data with entrepreneurial data, such as founding and funding of ventures in 47 European cities. One adaption of new ways of working are coworking spaces. They are shared working environments that offer office space and intangible resources, such as knowledge sharing, collaboration and networking. Access to flexible office space for self-employed, start-ups, and corporates is a key resource for businesses. Covid-19 has shown that space provision is becoming more flexible and ventures increasingly use scalable space instead of long-term lease agreements for office space or than owning it. Deskmag counts 18,700 coworking spaces worldwide in the year of 2018 with 1.65 million coworkers and high future growth expectations after COVID-19 [1]. Data were collected through two sources. Data about coworking spaces were collected through a web scraper crawling for coworking spaces within a city as of December 31, 2018. Those data were manually enriched by real estate and economic variables, such as the office high prime rent and office market size. Data about the funding and founding of ventures were obtained through using the database Crunchbase, including all start-ups in a city with their type of funding (including: seed, venture capital, private equity, debt convertibles and others) and their financing rounds. The Crunchbase database lists mostly young firms, commonly called start-ups and small medium enterprises (SME), and their financing with external funding. It includes firms that have needed or might need funding in the near future, or have already got funding. Hence, it is possible to relate spatial clusters with entrepreneurial activity and analyze for example the influence of (flexible) office markets on founding activity. This dataset enables researchers and practitioners to further explore important questions regarding the nexus between the real estate industry, entrepreneurship behavior, start-ups and regional clusters. Due to the scarcity of publicly available quality flexible office space market data, the dataset detailed in this article may play a relevant role to be ready to be used by researchers and practitioners. Funding data can be used for regional analysis, growth development, or any other economic issues.