Board Member at Carl Zeiss Meditec

Gertrud Roth

Head of Learning Management MED

Dirk Mühlhoff

Head of the Business Sector Refractive Lasers

Dr. Michelangelo Masini

Head of Innovation at MED Oberkochen and Visualization

"What I missed over the long term during the lockdown was the personal contact..."

...said Jan Willem de Cler, board member at Carl Zeiss Meditec, in our roundtable for ZOOM MED. He spoke with Gertrud Roth, Head of Learning Management MED; Dirk Mühlhoff, Head of the Business Sector Refractive Lasers; and Michelangelo Masini, Head of Innovation at MED Oberkochen and Visualization, about the impact that the pandemic has had on our day-to-day work.

The interview was conducted on September 23rd, 2020.

How did your teams handle the crisis?

Gertrud Roth: Very well, I think. I found our team to be dedicated, agile and very responsible. We started digitalizing all of our training units even before the pandemic began so that we could make them available to colleagues in the field. When the lockdown hit Germany, practically overnight, we fast-tracked this initiative nearly overnight as well. The team was very motivated and managed the balancing act well, considering that we were under real time limitations because of the reduced working hours.

Michelangelo Masini: A big thank you to the innovation team as well — you all contributed amazingly. Everyone came together during this difficult and critical time, took hold of the situation and implemented the required measures. We even experienced a boost in efficiency at the start because all of the developers were focused heavily on their own work and were able to resolve a lot of open issues that otherwise would have been interrupted by meetings. The situation was more difficult for the departments that deal with hardware or that work very closely with operations, as well as for tasks that require creative teamwork, for example. For them, the situation was complicated by the physical distance. Our high-quality IT infrastructure helped us overcome this somewhat.

Dirk Mühlhoff: Yes, the teams handled the situation with cool heads. Despite groups being split up, remote work, shutdowns and reduced working hours. This deserves recognition. I'd like to applaud two groups in particular: the IT department and the flextime officers. Hats off to the IT department for outfitting employees with laptops on such short notice, and to the flextime officers for resolving all of the organizational aspects.
Through the crisis, we have established even stronger ties as a team. And this is also because of the glimpses we have gained of each other's personal environments thanks to the team video calls. It has become entirely normal for us to turn our cameras on. It helped improve the quality of our communication. A positive effect.

Jan Willem de Cler: I agree. I also have the feeling that we listen to each other more closely because of the video calls. The pandemic has accelerated digitalization tremendously at ZEISS. It was also helpful that we've all known each other for a long time, that we had a personal foundation. It made the transition to working remotely easier. But over the long term I began to miss the personal contact tremendously, and I was pleased that we were allowed to return to work. I would also like to sincerely thank the production team for keeping production going during the lockdown. Thanks to them, we were able to continue supplying our customers and their patients.

What was it like for you and your teams to return to the office? Did it improve productivity?

Dirk Mühlhoff: It certainly did. Also, because it meant we could enter the labs again. A certain portion of our work isn't performed only on the computer, but also has to do with hardware. These activities suffered tremendously under the lockdown. Returning to the office and being allowed to work normal hours again really gave way to a lot of energy. And I think that also goes to show that 100% virtual work environments aren't the answer.

Gertrud Roth: The return to the office was very much welcomed by all because it allowed us to interact and have conversations that go beyond our department and our work-related issues again. People are laughing and joking again — something which is missing from our virtual meetings. These emotional moments are important for us all. They increase work satisfaction and, ultimately, they have a positive impact on productivity. The 100% virtual work environment also posed other challenges for management — we were forced to communicate more explicitly and to assign work in a clearer manner.

Jan Willem de Cler: That's a good point. It takes a different style of leadership to manage a remote team.

Michelangelo Masini: That's right, but it's a style of leadership which is also useful when we're all working together in the same physical space.

Gertrud Roth: Absolutely. We can't allow ourselves to fall back into old patterns.

Jan Willem de Cler: Members of management need to formulate clear objectives and goals, as well as the steps to get there, together with their team so that the focus is on output — the result — and not on "being present". It's less important whether the team members are doing their part in the morning, in the evening or in the afternoon. This gives responsibly-minded workers more leeway to be proactive, and management should be empowering them more.

Michelangelo Masini: I'd like to add something to what Dirk was saying — I was also relieved when we were allowed to return to the office. But I'm somewhat less so now because the space situation has become more critical due to the physical distancing rules. And when a lot of people are talking on the phone as well, it can get challenging. We still haven't found an ideal solution yet.

What do you think the new way of working will look like?

Jan Willem de Cler: I expect it will be a combination of virtual work and in-office work. To me, that seems to be the most reasonable way to continue fulfilling our promise to our customers. Going too far in the one direction or the other doesn't seem like it would allow us to do that.

Dirk Mühlhoff: I hope we'll be able to maintain certain things, like having video calls instead of just audio calls. I'm assuming the travel restrictions will stay in place for a while still, so we're definitely going to have to continue conducting training for service and application personnel remotely. None of us would have dared to imagine something like this before, and now it's become a necessity.

Jan Willem de Cler: I agree. I think not having to hold purely physical meetings at specific locations has caused something to change culturally. More people are being brought into the fold; we're becoming more "inclusive". This helps with international collaboration, and it also saves us time, money and energy.

Dirk Mühlhoff: …and it speeds things up. But not in the sense that we're sitting around twiddling our thumbs, but rather that we have a more consistent work rhythm, which ultimately leads to more productivity. Although, I still have a few IT features on my wish list... [laughs]

Gertrud Roth: I also think that international communication has improved a lot. We have the same focus worldwide: our customers and finding ways to help them. I've noticed that things are moving faster. Perhaps the time we've gained from the slow-down is being increasingly used for things like this?

Michelangelo Masini: I think we are going to be making much more use of online training and virtual tools in the future. Without the electronic document management system, for example, we would never have been able to perform document approval electronically. We've attempted to keep all projects up and running.

Are there any special moments you recall from the corona period?

Dirk Mühlhoff: I'll never forget our first virtual User Meeting. Until now it's always been held in person, and it was the highlight of the year. Being able to conduct it virtually with lots of participants was great. Organizing the event was also a special team task.

Gertrud Roth: We didn't expect there to be such a positive response from global participants in our training. My team was very happy about that, and they were even jokingly betting against each other to see which topic would have the most demand. That created a positive sense of cohesion within the group.

Michelangelo Masini: We recently kicked off the project for the next generation of KINEVO. We were racking our brains for a long time trying to figure out how to implement it. Finally, we held an in-person meeting and booked the large ZEISS hall. Everyone was sitting two meters apart. That was a really surreal situation: 20 people spread out across this huge space. And yet there was this amazing feeling of team spirit and excellent cohesion.

Have these experiences made us better prepared as a team for future crises?

Jan Willem de Cler: Fortunately, we introduced a resilience program nearly two years ago based on our belief that the world is going to become more unpredictable (in a word, VUCA). Long before we first heard about corona. The program was oriented more towards economic crises, but it proved helpful when the current pandemic started. The team absolutely proved their worth in this time of crisis. And yet, I'm beginning to notice a certain corona fatigue. We need to be careful. The virus isn't gone, and there still isn't a vaccine. We need to continue to be disciplined and cautious so that we can remain successful in good times and in bad.

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