Harmony and joy can be the key components of your business environment

The eleventh QED conference gathered more than 200 participants, from 7th to 9th May in Zadar, who learned how to build a stimulating and encouraging working environment and how to create harmony inside organizations and teams, through lessons, workshops and practical examples.

Software industry, as well as most of other industries and sectors, are all facing the same problem – how to turn the business and organizational chaos into order. How to create a corporative culture, in which, despite the everyday challenges, harmony is achieved and all the employees are being productive, innovative and creative?

This year’s leading speaker Richard Sheridan, the director of the company Menlo Innovation and the author of the book Joy.Inc, revealed how he managed to build a team culture based on the business value – joy: „There was a time in my life, in which I didn’t know what do to, I was working, and the job was never done, I fell out of love with my own profession and found myself in total chaos. That’s when I realized it’s time for change. I realized that the company’s structure should be simple, measurable and visible, and that the focus should be on human relations. So, we began experimenting. Our teams work in pairs, on a single computer, we have an open office, daily stand-up meetings, headphones are strictly forbidden on the workplace, chatting as well, and our employees are free to bring their children with them to the office. Can you even imagine all of this in your organization?“

Phaendra Boinodiris, the IBM leader of serious gaming and gamification revealed to the participants how to solve complex problems through a computer games concept. Many experts, such as Joachim Gucker and Thorsten Gressling from the ARS company and Tihomir Cirkvenčić from IBM, showed how they succeeded to achieve harmony inside their organizations, through pratical examples.

Marin Trošelj from STEMI and his round table’s guests, students Marta Paladin, Magda Topić and Fran Zekan showed that synergy is needed for achiving harmony. Despite numerous problems in educational institutions, which bring down the passion and love of discovering and creating, they managed to keep their passion thanks to the teachers and mentors who have been selflessly dedicating their free time. Older generations must invest into the young ones, and the young ones should use it to make our society and the world we live in a better place.

Apart from the conference’s main subject, a lot of attention was drawn to lectures on currently very actual subjects in the IT industry, such as the PSD2 directive, Blockchain, DevOps and cloud.

The best way to make change and for improvement is testing, ie experimenting. A finished model that can be implemented into the organization and that will organize the chaos will hardly ever exist. Still, the participants of the 2017 QED have seen numerous way of doing it. You should try to experiment. So will CROZ, because exactly that is the subject of the next QED conference in May 2018.