#MutAnfall würde ich mal sagen! Inspiriert durch tolle Begegnungen und Ideen beim gestrigen #WOLCoP MeetUp der „Working Out Loud“ Community of Practice habe ich heute in unserem Enterprise Social Network „ConNext“ nun auch (endlich) meinen eigenen Blog „FutuHR in Motion“ (in Anlehnung an unseren Claim „The Future in Motion“) gestartet. Da wir (Harald, Silke, Tom und ich) uns bei der Conti darum kümmern wollen, unsere bestehende WOL Community mit mehr als 1.000 Mitgliedern noch weiter auszubauen und WOL als Lern- und Arbeitsansatz weiter voranzutreiben, habe ich auch gleich mal einen Blogpost hierzu geschrieben, den ich (da nichts hieran confidential ist), gerne in bester WOL-Manier mit Euch teilen möchte.

Doch zuvor erklären Sabine Kluge, Katharina Krentz und Lukas Fütterer im folgenden Video noch einmal, was „Working Out Loud“ ist, wie es geht und welche konkreten Vorteile WOL für Unternehmen bietet.

Yesterday, I was participating in the WOL CoP MeetUp to exchange good practices on how we can further push Working Out Loud as an approach to working and learning in the digital age. Together with Harald Schirmer​, Silke Rehberg​, Tom Winkelmann​ and I decided to work on how we can foster WOL @ Conti — if YOU want to be part of it, feel free to join us. For us, WOL is not only an approach to guide and support change but also to pave our way to shaping the future of mobility together & #ForOneAnother.

As the world around us is rapidly and constantly changing, we often feel a lack of confidence — and some of us even seek for methods to cope with that development. And although we have great tools like ConNext at hand, we might also be unsure of what could be the right approach to working effectively and efficiently in the digital age. Quite often, this lack of self-efficacy lets us shy away from new ways of working and probably even burn the bridges to our digital future that we had already had the courage, trust, and self-confidence to start building.

From my own experience, Working Out Loud is a great method which helps you to build trust not only in yourself but also start creating trustful relationships to colleagues and people around you which might help you to enlarge your network and reach your goals — may it be on the job or in your private life. Being really passionate about sharing my thoughts and thereby supporting people to become more effective and satisfied with what they’re doing, I started to write an HR blog two years ago. Back then, I didn’t know that there was something called Working Out Loud — but I felt that this was the way I defined „work“ for myself. Infact, Working Out Loud was one of the main reasons why I started to work in Conti as I thereby got to know Harald and was grateful to find out that there were more guys like me who were eager to learn by sharing their knowledge and thereby build trust-based and purposeful relationships.

Thus, I truly believe that WOL can be a real success factor when it comes to enable transformation as it supports people to develop a growth mindset which lets us join our forces #ForOneAnother. Based on this sharing mindset, it’s incredible how you can literally see #Trust emerging in the purposeful relationships you are going to create. This trust helps us to provide and earn the #FreedomToAct that we all need to experiment, learn and continuously develop. I’m sure that this personal journey to learning and success will help to create the #PassionToWin that we individually and as ONE company need to excel way beyond our own expectations.

​​I often quote one of Harald’s blog posts where he states that we need a new way of thinking about efficiency — and this way isn’t about LEAN but about using our NETWORK to come up with ideas and solutions that we never could have developed on our own — or we would have needed to invest much more time in at least. Therefore, I often describe Working Out Loud as the „mental onboarding for the digital transformation“ which enables us to use the tools we have at hand even more successful and with a digital growth mindset. Coming back to my own story — Working Out Loud really works.

Starting two years ago I hardly had any network within the HR community. Since then, I got to know a lot of great people who really inspired me — like e. g. the incredible John Stepper. Thus, WOL helped me not only to broaden my network to people from the HR community but also to those who really take and live thought leadership in the field of Digital Transformation which will be essential for us as a company. This in fact encourages me very much to reflect about the role of HR on our road to transformation within Conti and to come up with ideas that can contribute to our vision and our strategic clusters „industrialize best fit“ and „enable transformation“. Too often we tend to doubt that we have something really valuable to offer — but when you just become aware of the fact that it’s YOU and YOUR ABILITY to empathize and trustfully connect to other people, this can be a real eye-opener. Don’t wait for someone to come up with a fancy tool — instead be, create, and lead the transformation you want to achieve.

As we understand HR as „Human Relations“, I am deeply convinced that Working Out Loud can help us build the bridge to the future. WOL as a mindset for the digital age and an approach to foster peer- and self-learning will provide guidance and offer support to discover new and real cool ways of working. Supported by great initiatives like „42 — new work style“ and the implementation of the collaborative O365 toolset, we will be perfectly prepared to shape the future of mobility together — and I am so curiously looking forward to being part of it together with you.

Wie immer freue ich mich sehr über Anmerkungen und Feedback! Falls Ihr Euch näher für das Thema „Working Out Loud“ interessiert und im September auf der „Zukunft Personal“ in Köln seid – trefft mich doch gerne in der Blogger Lounge. Dort spreche ich am 19. September von 15 bis 16 Uhr über das Thema „Working Out Loud als netzwerkbasierter Lern- und Arbeitsansatz für die Digitale Transformation“.