New colleagues in the project CULTURAL FIT
We are very happy that we could win two new colleagues for the project. Since August 2023, we warmly welcome Ms. Anett Rafelt. Ms. Rafelt brings valuable know-how from organizational development as well as from further education, consulting and project business to the team. Our second colleague is Ms. Hanne Lore Hofmann, who will enrich the team at October. Ms. Hofmann is a graduate of IHI Zittau and has just presented the results of her latest research on cultural fit.
She investigated which drivers and barriers prevail for the use of the concept of cultural fit in SMEs. In addition to a systematic analysis and review of the literature on the subject, Ms. Hofmann interviewed company employees as well as representatives of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Upper Lusatia, in order to reconstruct drivers and obstacles against the background of region-specific challenges. The decreasing availability of manpower on the market in general, the associated sometimes very scarce resource situation with regard to employees in the companies as well as the SME-specific characteristics with their mostly flatter hierarchies and the closer cooperation of all employees and of course the empirically proven positive effects of the concept of cultural fit are conducive to an adaptation in SMEs. On the other hand, companies have already had to cope with a large number of crises and still have to do so, there are no adequate management concepts for adapting the approach to SMEs that also take their special features into account, and the already existing scarcity of resources in SMEs has clearly proved to be an obstacle. Based on these findings, the project team, coordinated by Prof. Dr. Thorsten Claus, Prof. Dr. Remmer Sassen and Dr. Stefanie Hanke, will now work together with companies in the region to develop the training concept and the consulting approach to suit their needs. We are looking forward to everything that is coming and will be happy to report on how things have progressed.