Create your TenneT – - my perfect workplace

As part of the seminar "Health and Fitness Management" led by Dr Philipp Laemmert from the Chair of Social and Health Sciences of Sport, four Master's students conducted a workshop in cooperation with the TenneT company in Bayreuth. The aim was to find out the actual wishes and needs of the employees regarding their dream company and their dream workplace. For this purpose, the group used a method from entrepreneurship called "moonshot thinking".

With this very question and motivation in mind, the four students from the University of Bayreuth conducted a half-day workshop with employees of the TenneT company from the Bayreuth site. In addition to the application of the method, the main goal of the project was to get an idea, in cooperation with the employees of the TenneT company, of how the employees imagine their best and most health-promoting workplace. To achieve this, any limiting factors such as budget or feasibility were to be disregarded and visionary ideas and wishes for the "perfect workplace" were to be expressed.

A first and very important finding was that a lot of ideas and suggestions regarding TenneT's health management and the "perfect" workplace came up during the workshop. In addition, a very exciting trend was observed. It was not necessarily the unrealistic and utopian ideas that dominated the results, but rather more everyday and realistic wishes. 

Another core finding of the workshop showed that the participants all had different ideas and perceptions of their "perfect" employer. According to this, the big, albeit rewarding, challenge for an organisation is to offer new-work concepts, but also to enable classic work models if needed, in order to generate as many options for personal work design as possible.

During the workshop, it was particularly exciting when the focus was on the question of the motives and needs behind the aspects mentioned. Through targeted questioning techniques, it was possible to show that for many ideas and wishes there is a great need for connection and connectedness between employees. For example, the wishes for exchanges to swap objects such as tools and bicycles or activities such as window cleaning were very dominant. 

All in all, very valuable impulses for the internal health management of the company could be worked out, which take into account the essential needs of the employees. Once again it became clear how important and good it can be to involve the employees and to give them a space to express their concerns and wishes through new methods.

The seminar project will now be continued within the framework of internal health management. The workshop concept of using moonshot thinking in the context of health management was already presented by the students at a networking event of HR managers from Upper Franconia and met with great interest. Health management can and should be thought and lived innovatively.