The Covid 19 pandemic has turned work life upside down and digitalized it tremendously. Working from home has become the norm. New technical possibilities offered by online tools such as MS Teams, Slack, Asana, or other collaboration platforms can indeed reproduce the work process well virtually, but can we also use them to reach employees individually? Are employees only present or also engaged and motivated? After all, conversations in digital meetings are mostly functional and leave little room for small talk, which leads to emotional exhaustion.
A phenomenon described by the Institute for Occupation and Employability at the Ludwigshafen University of Applied Sciences as Zoom-Fatigue. In addition, more and more managers fear that the dialogue with employees will be lost more and more and that the company culture will suffer as a result. Therefore, the crisis demands a new style of leadership online and offline, perhaps even a completely new organizational culture. One question that needs to be solved is: How can I reach employees on a personal level via digital channels, measure their happiness, and increase their happiness?
With this question in mind, we approached our partner Breitenstein Consulting, which has been supervising interdisciplinary student programs from business administration and psychology at LMU Munich for several years. Here, a team of students accompanies a project as scientific advisors for several months. We would like to share the exciting results that were developed in this close cooperation in this article: