Between the home-office commuting of a couple of years ago and the home confinement of the last few months there may be a balanced, perhaps even more efficient, middle ground. The same goes for deserted or almost deserted offices, relationships with colleagues, family life and other aspects, provided that you work as a team with a logic of sharing, distribution and innovation.
“Working remotely brings with it the risk of losing the“ relational ”dimension, which is fundamental for the growth and development of innovative ideas that usually also arise from casual encounters. It is therefore necessary to create offices that can act as places for creative exchange and discussion ”, he explains to Repubblica Walter Ruffinoni, CEO of Ntt Data Emea and Italy. This basic idea is the basis of the “Smart Alliance”, the biannual project launched by Consorsio Elis and chaired by the Japanese giant, which involves 30 large companies operating in our country.
The initiative aims to create a distributed, zero-kilometer work network in five major Italian cities, by pooling the work spaces of the 30 companies. The workers involved in the project can now book through an app the closest and most suitable place for the activities set on the agenda between Milan, Rome, Naples, Trapani and Catania. Being an experimental model, an intense monitoring and research activity was also launched to analyze the evolution of the experimentation and collect data useful for evaluating the effectiveness of this third way. “By now the hybrid workplace – says Ruffinoni – represents the present and even more the future of the office”.
You have imagined a third “hybrid” way of working by focusing on offices distributed at zero kilometer. What makes you think that this could be the future, if not the present already?
“To remain competitive and attractive on the market, today’s companies must adapt to a constantly evolving scenario, with particular reference to the digital transition, accelerated among other things by the health emergency. This process must presuppose a priori a cultural change to organizations and therefore also a leadership capable of coordinating and guiding this change. The example of the hybrid model confirms it. In fact, those companies that have adopted a human-centric approach have found greater success in terms of productivity. In other words, those companies that have not only adapted, but that have facilitated and promoted, on a structural level, the development of ideas from below, collective intelligence and creativity “.
What contribution can and should business leaders make in this context? And how does leadership change in the era of the hybridization of times and places of work?
“This clearly leads to a new idea of the office in which support and incentives for creativity and relationships become cornerstones for concrete personal and professional growth. In this perspective, the leader of the future will give greater value and space to the sharing of experience and knowledge and will aim to ensure a greater balance between private life and working life of its employees “.
What are the elements that could favor a structural adoption of these models of “open working” and “shared” work between companies and cities?
“Remote working brings with it the risk of losing the” relational “dimension, which is fundamental for the growth and development of innovative ideas that usually also arise from casual encounters. It is therefore necessary to create offices that can act as places of exchange and it is precisely in this context that Smart Alliance is born, a project that brings together the companies of the Elis Consortium with the aim of sharing widespread work spaces that can on the one hand encourage relationships and on the other be able to dialogue with the neighborhood, becoming real meeting places “.
Do these hybrid frontiers of work also bring side effects with them?
“The hybrid office now represents the present and, even more so, the future of the office. Begun as a simple compromise to cope with the health crisis, it is rapidly transforming into a reality that we must consider. These new forms of work do not we can apply old concepts of control of the past: we need to review the way we work by focusing more on the objectives and consequently making our people more responsible. To do this it is necessary to focus on training and set up new methods that can support everyone in the search for harmony between private and professional life “.
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