In the interview with Marie-Ivonne Otisi-Schaarschmidt, Board Member at RA-MICRO Software AG, and Dr. Peter Becker, Founder and Chairman of the Supervisory Board

RA-MICRO Software AG, based in Berlin, is an innovative medium-sized software company. Its software development department employs more than 100 staff members. The company's main product is the RA-MICRO law firm software, which has been the market leader in Germany for decades. With a total of around 500 employees, the German RA-MICRO organization supports 70,000 PC workstations in law firms.

The COVID-19 pandemic suddenly made it necessary to maintain productivity, creativity, efficiency, and corporate culture at the highest level despite remote work, within a highly complex communicative interaction structure, for the benefit of both employees and customers. Since an examination of available market solutions did not yield any suitable products, a proprietary solution had to be developed quickly to address this urgent problem. This led to the creation of a completely new organizational solution for modern work: a virtual office. This is video-based but conceptually goes far beyond the idea of a team or video conferencing solution.

Today, we speak with Marie-Ivonne Otisi-Schaarschmidt and Dr. Peter Becker about modern office work, employee motivation and satisfaction, as well as the technical requirements needed to perform job-relevant tasks in a space- and time-flexible manner.

DIGITAL FUTUREmag: COVID-19 has exposed many weaknesses, particularly among medium-sized companies, and called into question long-established operational processes. How was your company itself prepared for the pandemic and the associated lockdowns? And what changes did this (crisis) situation bring about in your internal processes and structures?

Dr. Peter Becker: We were not prepared either. In practice, EVERYTHING has changed—and permanently. Thanks to our substantial development resources, we worked with an internationally established partner company to build our Virtual Office system based on Jitsi Open Source within a few weeks. Over the following months, we refined it in practical use with around 500 participants.

The vOffice concept was developed by Marie-Ivonne Otisi-Schaarschmidt and me. From the very beginning, we knew exactly what we wanted: to merge real office and home office into a productive whole on a virtual meta-level, without any productivity or efficiency disadvantages compared to a traditional office—in fact, quite the opposite. The world of work was to be modernized through digitalization. We wanted to know at all times who was in the real or home office, who had which communication status. Everyone should always be freely accessible for personal communication, especially for managers, just as if they were present in the company office on site.

At RA-MICRO, we have a complex organizational structure with many elements and teams. The foundation of a virtual company structure had to be an organizational chart that is transparent to everyone, always up to date, and visually tangible, showing who is who and where they belong. Onboarding new colleagues also had to continue—how else could new employees be immediately integrated productively in a home office situation?

DIGITAL FUTUREmag: What are the advantages over Microsoft Teams or Zoom, to name just two well-known examples?

Marie-Ivonne Otisi-Schaarschmidt: Video meeting solutions are episodic; vOffice, on the other hand, creates continuous video presence throughout the workday. Teams gives users spaces for group formation, while vOffice allows the company to centrally define the company organization and group structure across three hierarchical levels. vOffice falls under the category of corporate organization solutions; it can be classified as organizational chart software—with the difference that the result is not just pretty graphics, but the organizational chart serves as the living foundation for all workflows.

DIGITAL FUTUREmag: At RA-MICRO, you made sure that employee motivation and satisfaction do not suffer but are even enhanced. How do you achieve this?

Dr. Peter Becker: Steve Jobs once said that everyone wants to be part of something great. What’s terrible about constant home office for employees is the lack of shared experiences, casual chats, feeling appreciated, and witnessing successes. Instead, there are very limited opportunities to contribute and a sense of being cut off.

Our vOffice was surprisingly well received as a positive foundation for work. We conduct 500–1,000 internal video calls every day. In the morning, everyone starts work in vOffice—no matter where they are, whether in the real office or at home. It simply brings joy to everyone because you’re always part of the whole. In general, people here feel they interact more in vOffice than in the real office. Productivity and the work environment have clearly improved significantly.

We’ve long had a 4-day workweek with 36 working hours as standard. Following the resounding success of vOffice in our company, we are now introducing a hybrid workweek: 2 days in the real office. Monday and Wednesday for one half of the staff, Tuesday and Thursday for the other half. The days are swapped monthly. The benefits for employees are obvious, and the company saves half the cost of in-person workstations. Everyone is permanently happier after Corona than before—thanks to vOffice.

DIGITAL FUTUREmag: Let’s go over the security of your technology once more. Especially in the field of application for lawyers and notaries, highly sensitive data is often exchanged. How well is your system protected, particularly against hacker attacks or cyber-attacks?

Marie-Ivonne Otisi-Schaarschmidt: vOffice is a pure browser solution. It runs on all browsers based on the secure Chromium standard, eliminating the attack surface of a local client. It is based on the widely used open-source project Jitsi. vOffice is so secure that it is not only used by many lawyers but has already been widely deployed in the judiciary of one federal state.

DIGITAL FUTUREmag: Let’s take a look into the crystal ball: Digitalization streamlines and optimizes processes. Where do you see your company and, in particular, legal work in 10 years?

Dr. Peter Becker: In 10 years, we will see the almost complete disappearance of paper in daily work. I estimate that around half of law firms will store their data in data centers. Complex computer technology and server rooms will largely disappear from law firms. Instead, they will only have end devices that access resources in data centers. RA-MICRO will significantly drive and accelerate this development with a virtualized cloud solution at the highest security level – “vCloud”.

DIGITAL FUTUREmag: Many thanks for your well-founded, user-oriented insights.

The interview was conducted by Michael Mattis, publisher of DIGITAL FUTUREmag and organizer of the DIGITAL FUTUREcongress.