Is smart working the right path?

These days the recruitment market is experiencing an incredible degree of fluidity. Turnover inside companies, particularly in tech ones, is at an incredible high level.

Some of the credits of this situation goes to the increasing adoption of smart working not only as a way to fight pandemic, but as a standard way to manage company’s work force. This has expanded the area of interest of the candidates, that now can search not only around their locations but everywhere in their country, as well as outside it, so it’s pretty normal that people are taking advantage of this situation. If you managed to do any sort of job interview for hiring someone you quickly understood that most of the people are moving away because they see a broader market or because their company is willing to return to “standard working” in a timely manner.

But is smart working the right path for every company? It depends…

Please don’t get me wrong: I personally love smart working, but I feel like full smart is not my piece of cake. Having some days when I’m able to work from home in Milan, in the mountains, from a coffee shop or wherever I’d like to is perfect to allow better balance in my work-life routine, and I think that it could also improve productivity. Doing this every day is probably nice for productivity and flexibility, but leads to a potential excessive loss of physical contact between team members. Also, I cannot forget that meetings with customers and team members need to have fixed hours that usually fall during norma work hours, so I cannot simply decide to work from 2 PM to my daily goal because I prefer to do so.

Still, I think that even smart working, even when hybrid, is not suitable for every company and every employee.

Speaking about companies, assuming that they have a smart working compatible core business, they need to totally change their way to “oversee the employees”, and to use this also for understand that the previous method which was based mainly on office presence simply didn’t work. I’ve been a consultant over a long period of my professional career, and I perfectly know how employees can be creative when it comes to acting like they are working while sitting in the office. For these companies, smart working could represent a great boost in productivity, if their management is able to adopt rules and tools that can allow proper organisation inside their teams and tracking of objectives / productivity. Without this, productivity is dangerously bound to the good wills of individuals, because if I cannot track objectives I don’t have a real clue of the real productivity of an employee. You can think that they didn’t have it also when they were in office, and it’s perfectly correct, but being in office is usually a sufficient condition for an employee to actually work instead of doing something else.

And speaking about employees, I see that some obviously are trying to take advantage from smart working, not always properly: it’s not uncommon during standup meetings to hear supermarket’s checkout noise coming from someone’s not muted. This is pretty normal, though, and in some cases it could also be acceptable: if he/she is able to answer and be on track even during grocery shopping, I don’t really see an issue, because smart means smart and the important thing is that they achieve their productivity goals. But most of the times is not like that: the employee reckons he/she can be on track even during grocery store, while he/she’s not, both for a lack of focus or because he/she forgot that “I need a document I have on the PC but I can’t find it right now” (and speaking about companies’ tools, Google Drive or similar are a great help n these situations). In these cases, the leader should be able to rectify his/her path and let him/her understand that even if smart working could be unbound from standard work hours and standard work places, meetings and appointments that require to be in front of a PC need to be respected, or planned in advance to avoid this lack of focus.

On the other site, some employees turn into some sort of workaholics, not being able to cut down the work after the time has come. Even if this seems like a big win for the company, is extremely dangerous because it could lead to employee over burning, and can also let him/her feel like the company is exploiting him/her, even if it’s not company’s fault. Again, the leader should address these situations in a timely manner and teach the employee how to deal with the work and improve his/her work-life balance. Doing nothing and simply enjoy the results could be extremely harmful on the long run.

So, as you can see, smart working could be the way to go, but companies and management need to get involved in the change, and understand that probably to make employees happier they will have to work more.

P.S: You probably heard about the man that automated his job exploiting smart working and using his time to do something else? Well, I’m not totally against this behaviour, to be honest: productivity is a matter of results for the company: if he has been hired to do that work and he’s able to automate it, without a loss of performance, then probably he’s doing the right thing. My two cents: it’s not really “smart” to do it nor to advertise it: working is also a matter of personal growth, and I don’t see any in this behaviour, even if he claims to carry on some sort of personal project. Probably a smartest move would have been to sell the script as a SaaS and, with an additional monthly income, find some other position, but without knowing the exact position of the guy it’s pretty difficult to judge.

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