Is Smart Working a Win-Win Solution? First Evidence from the Field

Recently, smart working (SW) has emerged also in Italy as a new way to define an innovative approach to work organization. It is characterised by an increasing responsibility towards results associated to more flexibility in working conditions (place, time, tools) in a context in which the evolution of advanced information technologies (AITs) is influencing working vision and work itself, so enabling the diffusion of this specific phenomenon. According to some researches, this approach (also referred to as agile working, flexible work arrangement or activity based working) entails a focused organizational policy (that means new styles of leadership, new jobs and skills, new attitudes and behaviours) together with digital supports. Moreover, first empirical studies highlight that an interesting number of enterprises have begun in proposing initiatives and activities classifiable under this title. Despite the evident relevance of the topic, a theoretical framework, able to define clearly this tendency and its implications, considering both organizational and individual dimensions, is still missing, perhaps being it relatively a recent trend. Our paper aims to be a very first step in this direction: we propose the analysis of some case studies, chosen among those enterprises that are just engaged in the use of SW, through the lens of the literature on the role of technologies in work organizations and on the relationship between the human side and the technical one. The principal results emerged by our cases show that SW seems to attract enterprises because it answers to two specifics questions they consider always more relevant: the first is to support goal orientation of managers in the relationships with their colleagues; the second is to facilitate the crossing of the trade-off between work and life, being this aim one of the most relevant challenge. Our three enterprises, even if very different for sector, dimension, seniority, use SW for the same reasons. The potentialities of AITs play a dual-purpose role: on one side, they seem to enrich the social component in organization, allowing people to empower their work; on the other one, they put in evidence a necessary change in the cultural approach toward work both by manager and workers themselves. STS approach helps in understanding how it is crucial the alignment between social and technical system, being each of them pushed by different drivers and necessarily to coordinate, shall be impossible to develop a cooperative organizational context.