What do agile working methods like SCRUM have to do with job sharing? A lot! A high degree of self-management of employees, flexible working and increased team efficiency, for example. Frank Loydl heads the software development division in the group IT at Volkswagen, where the “Agile Center of Excellence, or ACE for short, can also be found . ACE organizes the ‘Agile Community’ of the Volkswagen Group. The Agile Community is an open format where all interested employees and guests meet once a month to discuss topics related to “agile”. If the agenda is exciting, there are sometimes 150 people from all walks of life, who get involved in presentations, bar camps, work sessions and the like.
When the jobsharing hub was still in its infancy, I visited it in Wolfsburg and spent a day in the agile community learning and exchanging ideas. In a constructive session, we talked about agile working 4.0 and the role of job sharing and SCRUM, and we have stayed in touch ever since. A good nine months later, Frank and I are picking up where we left off. This time in blog format.
Frank, you and your team are spearheading a major change at Volkswagen with the Agile Community. A huge corporation with rigid structures is to become more flexible and agile. What is essential for such a mammoth project?
First of all, it is important that the Agile Community did not come about through me, but rather that it was self-organized and intrinsic. This is essential because the employees participate out of their own interest and that provides the necessary strength. I only got involved later and, if you will, took over the sponsorship.
Are there lessons to be learned?
Absolutely! Every day. New ways of working, like “agile”, cannot be viewed in absolute terms and, for example, try to squeeze 10,000 employees into one and the same structure. That hasn't worked for the last hundred years and probably won't work for the next hundred years either! Teams that are already mature enough to use SCRUM need to be supported in their flow. And teams that are not yet ready need to be empowered more intensively. Or we have to allow them to work in other forms.
So create a landscape in which several, possibly even contrary models, coexist?
Exactly. And that, in turn, requires good leadership. The key is to find the right balance in terms of flexible working arrangements and models.
Can you give us a practical example off the top of your head?
A simple example is co-location. In other words, the team absolutely has to sit together in one place. Or SCRUM requires 100% availability of team members for the project. Another fundamental issue is the qualification and availability of the product owners. In reality, we can only fully meet these formal criteria in exceptional cases. And then you just have to make a few compromises. Otherwise, you end up with only five percent of the 10,000 employees on board and you've lost the rest because of some interface issues. And then, of course, the results don't come either. The big realization for me is to drop this expectation and allow for versatility.
I absolutely agree. Whether agile working or job sharing. There is no such thing as a universal solution for everyone. A good company understands that its employees have different needs in terms of how and in what form they want to work. Therefore, it should create a range of options and support its employees in finding the right approach for them. A one-size-fits-all approach has nothing to do with modern working in my opinion.
And a one-size-fits-all approach can be dangerous. If you're always in the agile community and only around people with a certain mindset, namely your own, you'll quickly come to the conclusion that everyone thinks like you. But that's not the case. It's usually a minority. And then you quickly underestimate the necessary capabilities of an organization to implement such things. And that leads to frustration and insecurity instead of self-organization. You have to be really careful here!
So on the one hand, a demand-oriented range of new forms of work and on the other, a slow approach instead of a forceful one. What needs do you see in relation to job sharing?
In today's generation, the demand for versatile work and more free time is noticeably increasing. I can clearly see this mindset in our labs and innovation areas. We have students there who still want to develop or do research. They are only secondarily interested in purely monetary compensation. The content of the work, creative possibilities or time to do something else are much more important to them. That's why I believe that job sharing will definitely gain more weight in this generation. When I'm with young people, I notice that very clearly.
Pairing is even more important to us. In this case, I don't split a job between two people, but deliberately put two FTEs in one position. At first glance, this may seem like a luxury or a waste, but in reality it gives us dramatically more flexibility and performance. For a few months now, we have been experimenting with roles that would probably have been something like a department head in the past. The management teams that use pairing are extremely fast and can feel as if they are in two places at once.
I am particularly pleased to receive this input. It is really important to us to get job sharing out of the traditional “stay-at-home mom” corner. We are also seeing a great deal of interest in job sharing from Generation Y. Did you actually learn something from our discussion of job sharing last fall?
Until that meeting, I was completely inexperienced when it came to job sharing. I only knew it as a topic that comes up when people retire or are on maternity leave. I hadn't thought about it at all beyond that. Looking back, our meeting was the foundation for our new pairing model. The whole thing is going so well that we now want to introduce it across the board.
A very strong topic: full-time pairing in job sharing. We will definitely stay in touch about this. Finally, one last question: can you see yourself working in a job share?
Absolutely! And I already have someone in mind.
And who?
I'm not going to say yet.
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