Smart working, from the English “agile work“, identifies a work reality that is now widespread and that involves not only operators in the IT sector but also more and more realities of the banking world and also manufacturing.

For some, smart working is mistakenly equated with teleworking and is reductively considered a mere work from home. The premise of this modern understanding of work is that employees are evaluated not for the number of hours they actually work, but for the results they achieve. As this ideology is assimilated, the office moves along with the worker himself: from home, from the bar, from the park, from wherever the smart worker remains in contact with employers and colleagues. The term smart refers precisely to the ability to easily stay in touch with one’s work, allowing the worker to reconcile work with family commitments and cope with the so-called unexpected.

Not just benefits for workers: companies that practice smart working have also found significant pros, from the ability to have smaller work environments to significant savings in terms of bills and permits. As for productivity, when you work two days a week from home, on average it increases by 20% (source: smartwork observatory of Politecnico di Milano).

Pioneering this trend was Germany’s Siemens, and it goes without saying that the first sector to embrace this project was IT, technology and consulting. In the wake of these, the major banking groups then joined in, involving a little bit all sectors.

Italy is also showing signs of increasing this work practice, going from 17% in 2015 to 30% in the current year (source: annual observatory of the School of Management of the Politecnico di Milano): a phenomenon that currently mainly affects large multinationals.