Christin reports: My internship in organizational development

During my studies, I was particularly interested in the field of change management. That's why I simply looked to see what internships were available in this area. I have to say that I've always wanted to work in the BAUR Group and get to know the company's culture. Personally, I feel extremely close to home in relation to the company. For example, when I walked in the door on my first day of my internship and heard Franconian small talk everywhere in the corridors (although many colleagues are currently working in the Anywhere Office), my heart sank a little. That's why I decided to do an internship at the BAUR Group.

My tasks in Organizational Development are that I prepare many workshops and appointments, for example by taking care of the organization, sending out invitations, creating the necessary documents and co-moderating or moderating the events. I also worked with the BAUR Group's Agile Center and supported the large-scale IT project New Horizon.

I was also involved in many different projects, such as the digital spring cleaning or the Work 4.0 project, in which I helped set up and develop our new podcast "alles bleibt anders - der Work 4.0-Podcast der BAUR-Gruppe" as a project member.

I also helped develop the concept for "Work 4.0 Collaboration Workshops". We mainly thought about how we want to work together after corona - how to reconcile working from home and office hours, how hybrid working can work, how the respective teams want to set themselves up and so on. With these questions in mind, we have developed a workshop concept. This will soon enter the test phase and then we hope to be able to offer these "collaboration workshops" for the teams in the near future.

My working day always starts with a daily meeting with my team. We've recently reoriented ourselves and thought about how we can organize our daily meeting differently. We now use a method from agile project management - the Scrum method. Using the Microsoft Planner tool, we write all our tasks on cards and organize them in two-week sprints. After the two weeks, we do a small review of the previous sprint, reflect on our collaboration in a small retrospective and then do another sprint planning. This restructuring of our dailies has turned out to be extremely valuable, as we have a good overview of what our colleagues are doing, what the current workload is and how complex the tasks are.

Well, and after the daily, the calendars are usually already very full. So the day is pretty dependent on all the appointments and meetings, which makes every day different and exciting.

What I found very cool was that my team took the time during my onboarding phase to discuss all the basic knowledge and methods that are important in organizational development with me. I was also shown the team goals and how management works in the BAUR Group with regard to the management guidelines. This meant that I had these in my head during the numerous tasks and could apply them accordingly.

Apart from that, I thought it was great that I always had exciting tasks that also interested me personally. My opinion was always sought and valued by my team. I was always particularly pleased when praise was sent via the team function.

The biggest challenge during my internship was definitely finding free appointments in Sophia's (my head of department) diary and then coordinating them with others if necessary. That was always a big quest 😀

I am currently looking for a Master's student position or a cooperation partner for my Master's thesis, which I will write afterwards. The internship has only strengthened my resolve to go in the direction of organizational development and change management. In the future, I can very well imagine developing myself further as an "agile coach" and would definitely like to continue working on the topic of New Work.

I think that organizational development is different in every company, but it is definitely very diverse. In particular, it depends on the corporate culture, including how feedback is practiced in the company. You should think about this when looking for an internship - and that's why I can only recommend an internship at the BAUR Group.