The Tragic Collapse of Work Ethic: How Modern Life is Killing our Drive to Succeed

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During my recent travels for business around the world, I’ve noticed something that struck me in all places I visited. Let me be provocative about it.

Introduction: Are you tired of people around you losing the passion for work? Everywhere you look, it seems like employees are more disenchanted with their jobs than ever before. From restaurants struggling to find qualified service staff to employees taking more sick leave than usual, it’s clear that something is wrong.

But what could be causing this global shift in work ethic? Despite vast cultural differences across various countries and industries, the trend persists. It’s a question that demands our attention, and the answer may be more sinister than you think.

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Webinar | How to Improve Company Culture

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Getting better results often requires a shift in organizational culture. But culture is about far more than just beanbags, table football, and free snacks.      

While we can’t design company culture, we can influence and monitor it. In this webinar, Giuseppe De Simone and Simon Sablowski explore why a coherent organizational culture is so important and the different types of cultures that exist. They give a detailed guide on how we can influence and measure our company culture to build one that is more conducive to our goals, as well as how agile42’s OrgScan™ tool can help you to achieve this. 

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The Great Resignation

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What is the Great Resignation?

The term Great Resignation defines the elevated rate at which employees started to voluntarily quit their jobs beginning in early 2021: during that year more than 40 million people left their jobs in the United States alone. Management professor Anthony Klotz coined the term and then a number of other names came to describe the same trend: the Great Renegotiation, the Great Reshuffle, the Great Rethink. Klotz believes that the rise of hybrid and remote work helped cause the phenomenon; he says: “How we spent our time before the pandemic may not be how we want to spend our time after.” And it hasn’t affected everyone equally: women have been more affected by the Great Resignation than men, and younger age groups more than older ones. 

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Organizational Culture Breeds Agility

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Embarking on a journey towards agility often requires a shift in organizational culture. Agility is more than just a set of rules and practices. It calls for a mindset attuned to agile values and principles. Failure to extend this change to organizational culture can end the agile transition before it even begins.

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Webinar | OKRs: The Path to Your Success

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Goals are what drive us and create a path to our success. Many of us have a big goal in mind that guides us. But one big goal can be overwhelming: how do we decide on the smaller parts and day-to-day actions that will help us achieve it?   

In this webinar, goal-setting experts Regina Martins and Birge Kahraman introduce you to the concept of OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results. They show you how to break your big, ambitious goals down into small, achievable, and clear steps. They outline how you can write action-orientated and strong objectives as well as impactful key results. Together, they explore how Agile teams can use OKRs, and how we can connect them to our business goals.

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Scrum Courses 2022

Scrum Training in 2023

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agile42 is a world leader is Scrum training. There are hundreds of training providers all across the globe, so what is it about agile42’s methods that keeps professionals coming back to us? We use scientific teaching methods and practices, including techniques from Accelerated Learning and in particular principles and concepts from Training from the Back of the Room.research has shown that students retain information better using these methods, and that conceptual understanding is deeper. In our training, we focus on the learners and not on the content, and we adapt our approach to each student’s specific needs and talents. The main points are covered, but we use different techniques and existing class knowledge to dive deeper into the concepts, which results in a dynamic agendathat aligns with the class’s specific interests.

Our Scrum courses are dynamic, designed for deeper practical understanding of new skills, and tailored for the individuals in the class. Sure, you’ll pass your exam. But you’ll also walk away with a greater depth of knowledge and understanding that will empower you when taking the next steps in your career.

Online Scrum Certifications

The agile42 training method has always been defined by interactive Scrum games, group work, and many, many post-its. But as our world changed and shifted due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we had to revise our training model. We didn’t want to fall into the trap of the formulaic video call, with a sequence of slides that flash across the screen while half the attendees are either dozing or distracted. We wanted to design training that kept the interactive, engaging agile42 style. This is how we devised our new training model: that of the “virtual class” with strong doses of interactivity and group activities thanks to the use of Zoom “breakout rooms”, beautiful Miro boards, virtual games, and a Slack channel that is available to the participants before, during, and after the course. Almost all of our Scrum training is available online.

Virtual Scrum Courses

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Webinar | Burnout: The Science Behind Sustainable Solutions

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Every year, as we approach the year-end, our coaches find themselves having more conversations about burnout. It’s a concept we’ve been hearing about for decades, so why is it still such a big problem? 

In this webinar, Regina Martins and Pascal Papathemelis tackle this concept. They share their personal experiences to cover why burnout happens and how we can spot the signs in both ourselves and others. They also explore some long-term sustainable solutions to this problem, and the roles that coaches and leaders in organizations play to prevent burnout from happening in the first place.

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How Resilient is Your Company?

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Only those who are able to react in a flexible way to market changes can operate and grow sustainably in the long term: resilience is the key. With the right methods and tools, any organization can evaluate its status quo and gain insight into its resilience.

Every company is a complex and organic construct. It is the sum of all employees, their managers, and the underlying processes and decisions they make. The theory goes that the stronger the consensus behind these decisions and processes, the stronger the organization itself. A company can be compared to a tree: the stronger the trunk and branches, the more resistant it is to external influences. In other words: the stronger the core message and process structures of a company, the stronger the organization.

Culture As a Cornerstone

In order to ensure a stable organization, a culture that is lived by everyone must prevail – the trunk, so to speak, to stay with the analogy of the tree. Understanding your own corporate culture is important in order to make sustainable changes, healthy growth and innovation possible in the first place.

Ideally, every single employee in the company must support and actively shape changes. For this it is important to know exactly what the status quo is.

It’s All About Understanding Your True Status Quo

But how do you get a really honest, unbiased picture of the status quo, especially when it comes to values ​​that are intangible, such as culture, management style or employee satisfaction? agile42 has set itself the task of making this data, which is so difficult to collect, visible. Once you can measure it, you can use it as a basis for the transformation processes to increase resilience in the long term. With our Organizational Scan™ we have created a product especially for this.

The OrgScan™: More Than an Ordinary Survey

Culture can be made visible through data, using the Organizational Scan™. It’s one of the Organic Agility Strategic Tools and provides real data on corporate culture, leadership styles, decision-making skills and the values ​​that are lived in the company. The OrgScan™ uses the patented SenseMaker® technology, which generates unbiased results through completely anonymous data collection in the form of micronarratives, which are not impacted by subjective moods or personal situations.

“High acceptance, facts instead of gut feeling”

“It was important for us – especially with regard to our corporate culture – to have a data-based classification that consists of the unfiltered view of our employees,” reports Christina Kiehl, Chief Finance & Operations Officer at Congstar. “Over 400 stories were submitted, which were analyzed in different dimensions. The advantages of the process: high acceptance, facts instead of gut feelings, the opportunity to further develop our corporate culture in a targeted manner and also to measure it. Our conclusion: Clear recommendation for the use of the OrgScan™.”

Want to learn more about the OrgScan™?

This is a translation of an article that originally appeared on t3n.de