YES. Culture development workshops in the CHT teams.

We see the culture development workshops currently underway in all CHT teams as an opportunity to continuously improve together and work hand in hand on the right issues so everyone is motivated and happy when they come to work. Within this framework, we as a team from the Silicones development unit identified which goals from the four areas of ‘Collaborate’, ‘Create’, ‘Focus’ and ‘Win’ are particularly important for our team and, working together, were able to develop concrete ideas on how we can achieve them. I personally found this workshop truly successful and was pleased that we were all able to see each other in person again on this occasion.

One Winning Team – celebrating success for more motivation

Specifically, we decided to work on our feedback culture. This most definitely also includes a stronger emphasis on celebrating successes and highlights and communicating them within the team. We started straight away with this and identified, for example, which silicone success products contributed to CHT’s record sales in the month of March. When you know what you personally have done to help achieve this, it simply makes for a great atmosphere! It also motivates people to persevere with other projects, even when things are not yet going quite so smoothly. Moreover, it demonstrates what can be achieved with effective teamwork. We also intend to improve on this aspect and intensify the exchange with other teams, for instance, by switching locations in a creative way and ‘getting a feel’ for other departments. We hope this will help us gain a better understanding of the workflows there so we can improve cooperation at key interfaces right from the start and work together as ‘One Winning Team’.

Sharpening our focus and opting for more sustainable approaches

In addition, we decided to sharpen our focus and stand behind decisions that have been taken so that we can complete projects in a timely manner and not lose sight of the bigger picture. Concretely speaking, we intend in future to ask for more input from our colleagues in the business fields so we can critically question which projects we should take on and which should be placed on the waiting list. It goes without saying that the issue of sustainability also plays a decisive role.

You can read more about this in my article on this topic: Recycling

By the way, after the workshop we noted down all the ideas on a digital whiteboard so everyone can refer to them whenever they want and, of course, add to them. I’m very eager to see what other great ideas we come up with together and I’m looking forward to implementing them!

 

Portrait Dr. Kerstin Mitzka
Dr. Kerstin Mitzka
Team Leader Research & Development Silicones, PhD in chemistry
“YES. I find sustainable solutions.”