What the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Alpha IC have in common...

At first glance, not much. With the exception of a few of us, we at Alpha IC are not particularly musical. However, we attach great importance to personal development and to self-determination in our company. Our staff has grown by over 50% in the last 30 months and we have managed to continuously improve communication, transparency and collaboration within our agile company. However, we had the feeling that there's still more to do and we need to give life to our spirit of agility and develop a stronger WE feeling.

What does this have to do with the Berliner Philharmoniker?

In order to counteract localistic or silo thinking even more strongly, and to further improve the possibilities of personal coaching for each individual, we offer each employee the possibility of choosing their own manager. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra also does this - they select their chief conductor.

Voting via app - self-determined weighting of criteria by employees Although employees already had the option of changing the manager and the corresponding team, this is rarely used.

With the help of our experience with digital solutions from our subsidiary Serthoro GmbH, we have developed a voting model that takes various criteria into account when casting votes. This is intended to ensure a fair and, above all, balanced choice. The weighting of the criteria was determined by the col-leagues themselves in one of our regular future dialogs in the employee circle. These include, for example, the consideration of different levels of maturity, locations and specialist areas as well as a balanced team size of 3 to 5 team members. Nevertheless, the top priority was the employee's choice of manager as a person.

Like at the Eurovision Song Contest, the counting of votes was live The employee had the possibility via a QR code and smartphone to put his preferred partners (executive) into his preferred order before the allocation.

Since we only used this tool to support the process, employees could express their satisfaction with the assigned partner and team afterwards and request a change if needed. For us, the free choice of manager is just one way to further develop the agile structure of Alpha IC, and through external communication we want to bring innovative impulses for company development to the industry.