Better together – New Work in the Kuhn Group

For some years now, the label “New Work” has been used to describe methods, organizational forms and corporate cultures that are intended to promote better self-fulfilment at work. In a company, the primary aim is to offer the customer better benefits than the international competition. For this, the customer hopefully pays a price that also enables the company to be economically successful. The purpose of a company is therefore not the self-fulfilment of its employees. Or perhaps it is?

For over 25 years, we have upheld the philosophy that really good performance can only be achieved on the basis of good cooperation (our management culture). We are sure that our employees can only perform healthy and better than our competitors in the long term if they can effectively bring their strengths to bear. This is not new or “New Work”, but has been the basis of good management since Peter Drucker and Fredmund Malik. What is new in this context are a number of methods and organizational forms that promote this development and participation. Often in combination with IT-supported collaboration, which has made great leaps in development in recent years due to the corona and energy crisis.

With expert external support, such as what Vollmer & Scheffczyk offers for medium-sized industrial companies, we began introducing new forms of organization many years ago and have continued to develop them further. These include the introduction of decision-making methods, circular organization on a smaller scale, the handling of information and cascading in store floor management, methods of self-organization and the consistent training of all managers in our employee-oriented management philosophy.

With the help of these methods, a shared understanding and the associated change in corporate culture, we have not only managed to hold our position in all previous crises, but also to consolidate our market position and remain a reliable partner for our customers even in the most turbulent times. We are particularly proud, for example, of the way we overcame the first few months of the coronavirus crisis, during which we were the only centrifugal casting foundry in the world that was able to deliver without interruption for weeks on end.

We are happy to provide in-depth insights into our very individual application of individual methods. They are usually unspectacular and best experienced in person, which is why we attach great importance to trial working days when hiring new employees, for example. With these insights, we would like to motivate people not to shy away from the “big new thing”, but to dare to start in small steps and hope to make a small contribution to the further spread of “New Work”. We are firmly convinced that this philosophy can also make important progress towards more humane working conditions in the industrial environment (New Work in production?!), with which companies can achieve even better performance in the long term.