The pandemic accelerated a crucial change already underway in our country, that of remote work, with different times and spaces compared to the traditional ones within the company.
But it has also created confusion between what is simply the transposition of the office to one’s home – home working, remote work – and what is, instead, a true organizational innovation, such as smart working and agile working.
Both of these work modes were designed with the aim of lightening, speeding up, and improving work performance, offering benefits to both employers and employees.
Smart working
Smart working in particular
is a new managerial philosophy based on giving people flexibility and autonomy in choosing spaces, hours, and tools to use, in exchange for greater responsibility for outcomes.
Agile working
Agile working, on the other hand, is a further evolution of smart working: it is a practice that originated in IT to speed up timelines even more, to choose the most suitable execution paths depending on the context, and to bring real project autonomy to life.
This happens when the team can easily take care of creating a product or service by incorporating additional skills and roles within itself, breaking down the traditional corporate hierarchy.
Both work modes are based on the fundamental role of trust among team members and the diversity of skills as an added value for achieving results.
Both are based on the use of technology, which in the case of smart working becomes a tool to facilitate remote communication, while in agile working, it also replaces written and bureaucratic communications.
Smart VS. Agile
The real difference between the two concepts is that agile working, as such, requires a revision of the company organization in order to create multidisciplinary teams. Since hierarchical structures are minimized, it is also the responsibility of individual groups to carry out a project and evaluate its progress and any areas for improvement.
L’agile working, insomma, non corrisponde semplicemente alla flessibilità di orario e luogo di lavoro: la vera discriminante è il lavoro di squadra – che deve quindi lavorare nello stesso luogo – e il modo in cui questo viene organizzato.
An increasing number of companies are reorganizing with an agile mindset to respond quickly and effectively to an increasingly complex world, which is referred to in jargon by the acronym VUCA, and is essentially characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
Head hunters regularly receive assignments to search for young managers with this background, but the search doesn't always succeed.
This is due to two main reasons: on one hand, in Italy it is very difficult to find people who have already experienced this way of working and have been able to apply this "philosophy" within a company – because it is a true approach to work, in some ways revolutionary – and on the other hand, because companies, even though they have an extreme need for such skills, often don’t know how to integrate people with these skills into an organization that, in most cases, still follows an old hierarchical structure.
According to a research by Boston Consulting Group, the vast majority of companies recognize the need for a new organizational model (73%), but less than half have actually started this change. Even though the medium- and long-term benefits of an agile organization are now evident – the same BCG research highlighted that the adoption of agile working increases by five times a company’s competitiveness and profitability in the market – between saying and doing lies corporate culture.
A change that the current pandemic has made increasingly urgent on one hand, and more difficult to implement in a short time on the other.
In fact, while in 2017 McKinsey estimated that around 375 million workers – or 14% globally – would need to change occupations or acquire new skills due to ongoing technological innovations, now 87% of executive managers openly acknowledge these skill gaps.
Skill mismatch and rejection crisis
In response to this skills mismatch, the most common solution (67%) among companies in Europe is to hire new figures who possess these skills.
The problem, however, is the “rejection crisis” of the organization itself in the face of these new, more transversal figures.
Because agile working relies on a very strong and shared corporate culture, based on the transversal nature of roles and teamwork, what experts call the sense of "corporate consciousness."
For an organization to truly be agile, it must have strong internal cohesion, a sense of belonging, and a shared purpose, creating a community of highly engaged and proactive collaborators, as if the company were a living organism.
In this scenario, a leader must be inspirational, able to influence and enable processes, define clear objectives and shared performance systems, and manage the complexity of relationships, without fear of taking responsibility and making mistakes.
All qualities that are highly sought after in Italy, but are often difficult to find and integrate if the organizational context is still traditional.
Con il rischio di non riuscire a valorizzare a pieno il loro potenziale.
