This contribution to the journal “Group. Interaction. Organization.” (GIO) takes a closer look at the mobile work of the future. Mobile work as well as virtual collaboration is becoming more and more integrated into our everyday working lives—not least reinforced by the COVID-19 Pandemic. In a Delphi-based study, we investigated the question of what mobile and virtual work will look like in the future. For this purpose, 35 future scenarios were described or processed in four rounds with a total of 460 experts and their desirability and probability of occurrence were evaluated. Positive developments are expected for the organization in terms of technology (e.g., advances in virtuality and artificial intelligence), leadership (e.g., increase in shared leadership and participation) and the work-life integration of employees (e.g., more flexibility and self-management). Negative effects are seen for teamwork (e.g., it becomes more difficult to build and maintain team cohesion and social exchange). How the challenges can be dealt with in terms of work design is shown and discussed.

Digitalisation affects all areas of organisations including processes, methods, tools, roles, or information flows and results in frequent changes with short intervals. In engineering projects (EP), new methods, and process improvement are important. Reflection, as a dynamic process between consciousness and activities (Jobst et al., 2020), has proven to enhance processes by offering benefits for team performance, team innovation and team effectiveness. In this paper, reflection is not aimed only at the solution but at the structured action and thus an active participation process of action. However, despite the high relevance and ongoing discussion about agility in engineering design, reflection as an agile method is rarely established in EP. While a plenty of reflection methods is described in the literature, only a few consider the entire Method EcoSystem (i.e. method use, context, design goals, information artifacts, and design outcomes) relevant when adapting and improving EP. To address the analysis and adaption of methods and design processes within existing Method EcoSystems, this paper considers the objects and process of reflection form an engineering point of view. Following a framework established in earlier work, a Reflection Canvas is proposed as a tool to raise awareness and structure and support reflection activities to implement new methods, adapt processes and improve collaboration in EP. Therefore, the analysis reflects on the tactical (development team) and operational (development team member) level and focusses on the three reflection dimensions social, process and goal. To assess the quality of the approach, we subjected it to a first practical test. The proposed canvas was evaluated to be helpful. On the one hand, the results illustrate the relevance of structured reflection in organisations. On the other hand, support for planning (e.g. in documentation or clarification of responsibilities) for implementation in everyday work is given.

Considering transformation processes within organizations, reflection is an enabler for learning and adaption of engineering processes, methods, and tools. Moreover, reflection as a core element of agile engineering approaches. However, a sound understanding of reflection behaviors of engineers or engineering teams is lacking. In this paper we proposed a structured reflection procedure including different dimensions to reflect on. To analyse reflection behavior of engineers and engineering teams we propose a coding scheme comprising of nine behaviors. The coding scheme allows to evaluate the reflection behavior in real time and give feedbacks to improve the quality of reflection. The proposed coding scheme is initially tested within a workshop with industry partners.