Our organizations are experimenting with new ways of working according to the cultural and organizational changes that are playing an increasingly central role to employees’ needs. In this context, we can find smart working programs and the possibility of working anywhere.
What does Smart Working mean?
Smart Working is not synonymous with working from home. It instead means working in (even different) places that meet the needs of our daily activities. Smart Working is not a methodology or a tool. Smart Working is a way of working that aims to improve productivity by allowing the employee to choose working hours by fitting it to private life needs and adapting to them behaviors, technologies and spaces. Smart Working requires new skills from employees, in addition to strictly professional ones, which mainly involve time and responsibilities management, personal and corporate devices.
The situation in Italy
According to the research of the Smart Working Observatory 2017 of the Politecnico di Milano, there are currently an estimated 305,000 Smart Workers in Italy: employees who have the opportunity to choose their working methods in terms of place, time and tools used.
And the company culture?
If the advantages exist and are measurable, however, we should consider that the new ways of working are not entirely free from possible difficulties and require appropriate procedures and tools. It is important to keep in mind that supporting and managing a far-away team is certainly not easy: distractions, lack of the physical "community" of colleagues and communication barriers are potential problems. Here never as in this scenario, technology can take on the role of both a necessary medium for carrying out activities and a facilitator for the maintenance of corporate culture through new forms of communication and expression.
The technological tools to support Smart Working
Interactions, ideas and knowledge exchange are the necessary conditions to contribute to the achievement of objectives and the growth of a team or organization. But being at the office is no longer an exclusive and necessary condition for effective interactions in real time and at the same time. Collaboration and communication platforms represent the meeting point between the company and the employee while the virtualization of company technologies on personal devices helps to definitively decouple the hardware that resides in the physical station, determining its "lightening". The creation of unique digital identities for immediate access to the services and resources of the company information system, zero password procedures, self-service logics and virtual spaces for hard disk sharing, are the appropriate solution in the hypothesis to be meant for simplifying the user experience. The objective consists of amplifying the advantages of agile work and investing in the collective intelligence available in the company.