To date, at least in Italy, the term “smart working” is often associated with that, unfortunately still very current of “COVID-19”, attributing more or less unconsciously a partly negative meaning, which denotes an “emergency” status of the modus operandi we deal with while working from home. This is also because most of the companies in these two years have been focusing mainly on understanding how to translate the working paradigm used in the office to Working from Home.
Though this approach has been useful in a first phase of the pandemic to face the exceptional nature of the event, today, it can certainly represent an obstacle; either for existing employment contracts that do not contemplate (and how could they!) such a particular situation, or for the reluctance of some company figures, loaded with an “old-school” background, in accepting a way of working so different from the traditional one.
Yodigito strongly believes that smart working should not be office work applied to remote work but an alternative to it. It is for this reason that the company has been designed and structured – indeed, it would be more correct to say that it has been restructured – to allow its employees to be able to work in agile mode wherever it is possible to do so: from home, in coworking spaces, on the beach, in the mountains or, if you have one, from your sailboat.
I, for example, alternate days when it is more convenient for me to stay at home, might it be because the landry is overdue, to others in which I prefer moving to a co-working space with cafe in the city centre, just to have the chance for a chat with someone during the coffee break. I believe that this freedom to have one’s free time between tasks is regenerating and helps to make my working day less stressful.
Working remotely, at least for Yodigito, does not mean being completely unaware of what your colleagues are doing. In the team I am part of, for example, every morning we have a stand-up meeting on Teams to keep us aligned, we chat on Teams to support each other with our assignments and, of course, we end up filling the chat with lots of memes.
Certainly, smart working also introduces negative aspects, among which we can include a more complicated on-boarding process. In fact having working tools, such as laptop and docking station, delivered to the doorstep makes the process inevitably less “welcoming” for the new worker. However, there are solutions to this, simple and already adopted in the company. First of all we encourage the use of the webcam, in order to make online meetings less impersonal (it’s much better to see a friendly face instead of a couple of initials on the screen). And most importantly we do meet in person from time to time and more frequently during onboarding.
It is clear that we are facing a revolution in the way we work and in the way we relate to our colleagues. We are embracing it nonetheless. Will it last? I think so. Is it better or worse than in the past? It depends. I believe that the way in which we in the company have decided to deal with the matter is the correct one. Posterity will judge.