Managing global teams – spread all over the world in different time zones; new and much closer collaboration with external and internal partners; new ways of communication and collaboration enabled by new technological possibilities. The changes in our working environment have many and very different faces.

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You can do a lot of things right – and still fail. That’s because success and failure are two sides of the same coin. Nevertheless, in many companies failure is stigmatized, especially in Europe.

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Digital change is already impacting daily life in a variety of ways. People are using increasingly sophisticated smartphones and taking them everywhere they go. As a manufacturer of liquid crystals, which made the flat displays and brilliant images of smartphones possible in the first place, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany has played a defining role in this trend.

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As a result of digital transformation, we’re increasingly working across national borders and department boundaries. Globalization is making intercultural collaboration more and more important: This is the only way for companies to make the best use of their employees’ expertise, whether functional or local.

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Companies that want to thrive in the digital age must prepare their employees for the new challenges that lie ahead. That’s because the skills required in the new working world are changing dramatically.

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Create transparency: The basic prerequisite is the simple admission that failure is part of the game. That’s because the level of trust needed for this can only be created where mistakes are openly discussed.

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In the new world of work, shaped by the opportunities provided by digitalization, life-long learning becomes more and more important. Future innovations will not be driven by technology alone, but particularly by the people using the technology, and the way they work with each other.

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Digital transformation and its impact on the new world of work are slowly but surely changing existing hierarchical structures in companies. This is because greater flexibility and agility are often at odds with classic organizational models and traditional leadership behavior.

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Of course, nobody knows exactly what the future holds. But we need to think about what might happen – and how we want to shape potential changes. In today’s blog, I will venture a fictitious glimpse ten years into the future.

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