Due to the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, which led to a worldwide pandemic, many companies were forced to rethink and redefine the working conditions for their employees and the networks with their business partners to secure their productivity and economic survival. Many of these developments have been discussed even before the pandemic as a necessary reaction to economic and societal conditions that are increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. A situation that has become known by the acronym VUCA. The pandemic has accelerated and changed numerous of those developments. Through the systematic analysis of lessons learned during the pandemic, the BMBF-funded research project COVID19LL aims to identify successful solutions and measures that have emerged in three different German regions (Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony). The aim of the project is to identify the problems companies and organizations face and what they have learned from the change process thus far. The project thus aims to ascertain whether innovative and digital forms of work created by the pandemic could lead to positive impulses, which might prove successful in the working world in the medium and long term and the extent to which these can be transferred to other industries. This paper presents the methodological approach and outlines first results of interviews with employers and employee representatives as well as company representatives in order to identify best practices and lessons learned. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
COVID-19LL: A Systematic Approach to Identify Best Practices and Lessons Learned in German Economic Sectors