When Tobias Voegele started as head of human resources at the insurer Signal Iduna in 2020, he found a department that was capable of everything – but not agile. The company had grown inorganically over many years, and with it the human resources department. The result: a unit that was organized along locations rather than functions. “I took over a classic administrative area at the time,” he remembers his beginnings. “For example, there were two different departments in Hamburg and Dortmund that had comparable tasks, but carried out many of them completely independently of each other.”
For Vogele there was a need for action. Because: “HR departments today are confronted with enormous complexity and the requirements are huge,” says André Häusling, founder and managing director of the HR consulting company HR Pioneers in Cologne. In order to deal with this complexity, says Häusling, agile working methods are a great lever.
