Dealing with SmartWorking today and the skills it requires

Everywhere on the internet today it’s very easy to find tips, suggestions, guidelines, pieces of advice on how to become a SmartWorker or on how to help your employees become good SmartWorkers. Everywhere in the internet definitions of this new type of approach to work are provided and discussed.

Due to the current COVID-19 Pandemic, all over the world workers, students, professionals had to rely very much on technology for being able to work or to study from home during the Lock-down period required by Governments.

With this Blog we would like to simply define what “Smart Working” actually means and what are the skills required today by this way of working that has created a shift from the more traditional “work from company” mode.

With “SmartWorking” we refer to the phenomenon in which the worker can carry out his/her professional activity wherever he/she is, independently of the geographic location, including the work that is carried out from home.

This definition comprises by default the use of communication technologies like PC, Internet, Smarthphone, Videoconference tools, emails and so on in order to carry out the daily working duties and activities together with working in virtual teams with colleagues. This requires also to have a specific and dedicated space where “Smart or Agile” working is carried out.

The key and central idea here about “SmartWorking” is a radical cultural shift from a professional activity based on the physical presence of the worker inside the company to another one in which he/she is absent. What actually counts in this “Modus Operandi” is the worker’s ability to achieve in an autonomous way the given objectives rather than to simply carry out given tasks.

In addition this new approach requires the ability to manage or to participate into virtual teams and no longer into face-to-face ones. With virtual teams we refer to the ability of grouping people together online on the Internet just for discussing on a given issue, for simply meeting up or for carrying out specific tasks altogether.

This radical change requires both the employers and the workers to develop key specific transversal skills that become now even more important than before.

We have identified the following key skills as some of those required today by SmartWorkers:

• Being able to plan autonomously our own work;
• Being able to well balance personal, family and professional commitments;
• Being able to meet the given deadlines and objectives;
• Being able to use technology for proper communication;
• Being able to work and participate in virtual teams.

We have always believed in the power of soft and transversal skills for the success of a company, of workers and future graduates and this indeed became the main value proposition of our daily activity. However, now even more than before, this has became a priority for everyone, everywhere in the world. We believe that the introduction of technologies also for “SmartWorking” purposes has and is changing the world, and this will impact the way how both companies and universities will work also after the Pandemic. We are happy to be part of this change and cultural shift and we will continue supporting it through our tools and technologies in which we have always believed in.