#4 – NEXTGEN Culture and the Community Management

Hi and welcome to my blog! I am excited to share with you my latest experiences and insights into sustainable projects at Evonik. Now that you are ready, let’s dive into >>NEXTGEN Culture and the Community Management <<.

Do you remember the Next Generation Evonik and its elements? This article is all about people, human resources and culture at Evonik - the Next Generation Culture.

This Evonik corporate program is about both structuring Evonik's human resources processes in a sustainable way and anchoring sustainability in the thinking and actions of the employees. The aim is to involve the employees and take them along with us. The Community Management team is responsible for implementing the program, and in my role as an intern I was able to support the team in their work.

An important aspect of the daily work is the communication with the employees on the Evonik Social Network. On this platform - similar to an internal LinkedIn or Facebook - cooperation is managed via topic-related communities. One of these is the NEXTGEN Culture Community. With over 1.300 members, it is one of the largest ones on the Evonik Social Network. Here, the latest news and actions on the topic of sustainability at Evonik are published in a coordinated system.

One of the projects is called "What we already do" and contains a collection of measures on the topic of sustainability with a personal reference, i.e. actions that employees have already implemented on their own and successfully in the company. These are all collected in the community and there are already more than 70 contributions.

The spectrum of measures is quite wide. From measures such as "doing without paper" and "using the stairs instead of the lift" to actions such as "saving water and reducing waste", worldwide site-related clean-up days or a project for the recycling of plastic waste in Mexico: There is a lot to discover and the great actions show how intensively the employees at Evonik are already dealing with sustainability. In my opinion, every action would really deserve a place in my blog, but I would also like to tell you something about Community Management.

As mentioned, I'm also part of the Community Management team, which personally means a lot to me. The above-mentioned Evonik Social Network, ESN, is managed and constantly developed by this department. The goal is to empower employees so that they can exchange ideas through internal communities and forums and thus make the most of digital collaboration in social networks.

Especially at the beginning, the Evonik Social Network was very helpful in finding people, getting information and networking directly with them. In the Next Generation Community, I even had the opportunity to be invited as a guest on a mini podcast three times. Or as Daniel, head of the team, says: "We have a guest today and Surprise Surprise, it's Maike and her project again." :-).

Here I talked with Daniel about my current topics at Next Generation Culture and introduced myself and my project, the Green Journal. It's really exciting to see how many different formats the Community Management team uses for the community and also how much technical effort goes into the process. 

Another focus of my work is the preparation and implementation of the Evonik learning hours on the topic of NEXTGEN Culture. In this interactive format, employees have the opportunity to receive first-hand information from the program team and ask questions about NEXTGEN Culture and the associated sustainability aspect. In addition, individual measures are presented by the responsible employees and discussed in the plenum. So far, I have been able to participate in three of these formats and to  help organize them. The virtual exchange took place with employees from Asia, America and Germany. This shows me once again that sustainable thinking and action do not stop at national borders and is a global issue!

These are just a few of many topics related to the community management and the Next Generation Culture. Further steps and measures are planned and I am looking forward to all that is to come.

In my next post I will give you an exclusive insight into a chemistry lab, the business line Care Solutions and what chemistry has to do with our skin cells.