Digital responsibility at Deutsche Telekom means thinking about future work as part of its dynamic transformation process and ensuring that despite all the changes, people remain the focus of all decisions.
The workplace is changing rapidly, and the speed of the change is constantly increasing. All sectors are affected. Chatbots support our customer service, videoconferences can take the place of business travel, and artificial intelligence helps out with data analysis. At the same time, the requirements for employees are naturally changing. The half-life of knowledge is constantly decreasing, and willingness to change and learn are becoming core competencies.
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 in the past. They are also assuming greater responsibility for themselves overall.
That’s why digital responsibility at Deutsche Telekom means thinking about future work as part of its dynamic transformation process and ensuring that despite all the changes, people remain the focus of all decisions.
Future Work at Deutsche Telekom
As we become the Leading Digital Telco, the ways in which we collaborate are changing. This is what we at Deutsche Telekom call 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 at the heart 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.
Currently, and also as a result of the pandemic’s impacts, the framework for our collaboration is defined by five guardrails. We invite and expect our employees to work out the specific details regarding how the framework is applied. With this approach, we can combine the best of both worlds – the physical and the virtual world, or the analog and digital world. To this end, and working in cooperation with the Group Works Council, we have produced the Manifesto on the new Way of Working. 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. Among other factors, the interaction between human and machine is becoming increasingly important: Chatbots support customer-service processes, videoconferences take the place of business travel, and artificial intelligence supports in data analysis. Like in all other transformation processes, it goes without saying that we will not leave employees to face these changes alone. This example proves again that we at Deutsche Telekom put digital responsibility into practice.
Future Work for our customers
The pace of digitalization is affecting every sector and many companies are reorganizing their internal processes. They are implementing mobile work, offering more flexibility in terms of working hours and workplace, or creating hybrid working environments and models.
As a partner and guide on the road to digitalization, our expertise is also in demand when it comes to future work. This involves the technological infrastructure, our core business. However, our own experience with changing work environments is also appreciated.
In cases where the majority of the workforce works from home, different office equipment as well as real estate that meets the respective needs is required. Here, too, we invite our partners to benefit from our expertise.
We consider employee acceptance of new technologies as an essential success factor. According to our understanding of digital responsibility we recommend our partners to pay attention to this when designing and implementing New Work strategies. This is digital responsibility filled with life.
