Today we have selected Johannes Muller to take his interview. He is the Co-Founder & CEO Workpath.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
Workpath and the entire team are doing well in this time characterized by incredible amounts of change. Even though this special time is certainly difficult for many people, we also see many exciting developments. The digitalization of companies, schools, and other organizations, for example, has experienced tremendous progress.
We also saw many organizations rethinking if the way they organize and steer themselves is still working in today’s hyper-dynamic market environment. There were many relevant discussions about what they can do to ensure sufficient adaptability and speed in the future.
Even though the circumstances that led to these developments were tough, I am convinced that those discussions and resulting change processes are important.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?
To understand my motivation behind founding Workpath, it makes sense to take a closer look at what is and has been actually driving my co-founders and me.
So from the very beginning, we were thinking a lot about how people in the future should live and work together. Seeing the change in our economic and working world over the last 20-25 years made it very apparent that we need to rethink how we collaborate, innovate, and lead teams and organizations. People don‘t buy products anymore; they want to get value delivered to them (think about Spotify, Netflix, Car2Go. And if companies do not find ways to innovate continuously, they are overtaken by new competitors within weeks. Also, their size no longer protects them from the competition, but it can often be a disadvantage, making them slow to change.
We decided to equip companies with the right processes and tools to cope with these challenges and make a new way of work happen. So Workpath set out to be the strategic operating system for companies aiming for more speed and adaptability in the way they collaborate, innovate, and lead teams from strategy to execution.
How does your company innovate?
At Workpath, we are convinced that continuous innovation can only work if you.
- Bring together diverse experiences and points of view to find creative solutions to complex problems.
- Create fast feedback loops that help you to learn and iterate frequently.
- Open up your innovation process to external stakeholders like customers and partners to create a 360 view of the value you are planning to deliver.
- The most innovative companies now (think, e.g., about Google) and even more in the future will operate as networks of people who bring together their best insights to create the best value jointly.
How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
Our team has remained largely healthy and has done incredible work during the pandemic. So we are fortunate that we have grown even closer together through the crisis. Despite all the challenges, such as months of working with young children in a home office, Workpath has continued to grow, and we have been able to develop great solutions.
In addition, we are in an industry that tends to benefit from current developments, both through our collaboration models and our business model with our customers – all of which cannot be taken for granted. This major external shock also offers many opportunities to reflect, realign and take risks.
Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?
We were actually reinforced in a lot of things we do. The crisis showed us that we need to focus on what is important in today’s working world. Eventually, all that matters is outcomes. Other than that, we really understood even better the extent of changes in our business and working world and how much need there is to actually work “on the system,” meaning the way organizations are run and how strategies are turned into outcomes.
An important but not so difficult decision for us was to implement our new working model, “Workpath Anywhere.” Workpath Anywhere allows our employees to find a hybrid working model that works for them. They can work from home and the office and spend 40 days every year work from anywhere they want. There is no one-size-fits-all working model – not everybody wants to work from home, not everybody wants to come to the office every day – so we want to offer the flexibility to create the right work set up for every employee to thrive.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
Luckily, we could use our own software solution to navigate through this crisis. Through its workflow tool, Workpath gives great support to keep everybody focused on what matters, no matter where they are. We benefited from the transparency the software gives about the goals of every team, how they relate to and depend on each other, and how they are currently progressing. This helped us a lot to stay in sync across teams and the entire organization.
Your final thoughts
I think we live in incredible times and will only understand the extent of the changes in our business and working world in retrospect. In general, the crisis was a catalyst; it accelerated many developments, revealed some realities, and showed what was really important for any business.
This also helped us at Workpath, together with our customers, to further define what our role to them can be and will be in the future. All that matters is outcomes. No matter where you work, how you work.
- Spokesperson: Johannes Müller
- Company: Workpath
- Website link: https://www.workpath.com/
