The Next WoW
Reimagining hybrid work for an innovation team
In the beginning of 2020, as cities began shutting down due to Covid-19, employees around the world started to work from home and adopted a completely new lifestyle. There is no doubt that Covid has changed everything: the way we work, collaborate, and innovate. Triggered by these circumstances, we developed the next Way of Working – the next WoW.
As one of the longest living innovation teams at SAP, we started the AppHaus 2.0 project in 2021, to reimagine hybrid work for an innovation team. We put our Design Thinking hats on, interviewed eleven innovation leaders, ideated on concepts, and tested them on ourselves. The result is consolidated in the Next WoW, a whitepaper which documents our journey, and explains what worked and what didn’t, in our experiments of hybrid work.
“Why should people return to the office if they can work remotely? Create a compelling reason for people to be in the office, use the location as an opportunity to build a team culture.”
Dan Barton, User Experience Lead & Co-Founder, Bluestonex, UK
The Three Pillars of the Next WoW
Innovation is a contact sport, it requires a diverse group of people working together. Since the pandemic, this close physical contact changed. Can you still innovate when your team can’t all be together physically? And how do you do it? Our answers can be found in the Next WoW which focus on three key pillars:
Hybrid Team
How we work as a team
A hybrid team consists of a flexible work structure where at different times some team members are in the office location, joined by other members remotely.
Hybrid Collaboration
How we work with externals
Strong collaboration is a key driver of innovation. For a creative team like SAP AppHaus, collaboration goes beyond our own team, and always includes our customers, along with their end-users and key stakeholders.
Hybrid Space
How we work anywhere
As the pandemic interrupts business travel, we ask: how might we recreate a highly engaging collaboration experience with our customers, minimizing the need for business travel?
Experience the Next WoW
The Next WoW is a living experiment, as we are still ideating, prototyping, testing, and iterating. We encourage you to share your feedback and join us on this exciting journey!