Learning launch – Smart working in my company

1.  Challenge: describe your challenge, including all relevant information.

I am responsible for trade union relations in an international banking group with about 65,000  employees in Italy and 25,000 in over 20 countries worldwide.

Our challenge was to start smart working in the company to meet the needs of employees for  their work life balance and increased company productivity. In Italy there weren’t other smart  working experiences applied in large companies and there were very few experiences in small  companies. We wanted to find the way to use smart working on the one hand after an  agreement with the trade unions and on the other the approval of the managers. We had to  start with the project in 6/9 months, at the same time as Expo 2015 started and we had little  experience of remote working. We wanted to start with all the departments and all company  classification levels without restrictions, excluding only the employees who work in branches  opening to the clients,

The team was made up of people from all departments (organization, real estate, human  resources, ICT, etc.) and also of members of the union.

2.  Selection: in your own words, briefly describe the tool you have selected (eg. What it is and  why you selected it for your challenge - including any appropriate videoconferencing  references).

Having no experience to rely on, we chose to work on What wows and what works, and we  worked with Starting launch.

Before starting, all the members of the team attended a team working course together to  improve their collaboration.

3.  Application: describe how you applied the selected tool to your challenge (eg what you did  and how the tool was applied effectively or ineffectively).

The team spent many hours going to understand what the workers wanted, what the manager  wanted, checking the procedures and identifying the best solutions, with few rules and limits.  Our budget was limited but fortunately 70% of the employees already owned company  devices.

Based on the first interviews with colleagues and managers, we organized some brainstorming  sessions to understand how to organize the work, some morphological analysis sessions, also  checking how to modify the procedures, but making very few changes, also because many  of our processes were already paper-based.

The agreement with trade union was made on December 2014 to start the test from March  2015 and until December 2015. The employees initially involved were around 1000, but  increased during the test to around 3800.

At the end of the test was made another agreement was with the trade union to use smart  working as a common method of carrying out the work performance in the company in Italy.  since 2016.

Then other teams were made to ensure testing in other countries, which have different  characteristics compared to Italy.

At the end of 2019 there were about 17,000 people who habitually do smart working, of which  around 14,000 in Italy and 3,000 abroad.

4.  In-depth analysis: describe the intuition that you obtained by applying the tool you selected to  your challenge (for example, how an intuition influenced your way of thinking about challenge  and design thinking in a broad sense).

One of the essential elements was that people wanted to do in smart working, but the  managers weren’t sure they could control and verify work productivity and achieve their  expected results.

So, before starting the test with about 1000 people, we had meetings with all the managers to  explain their smart working philosophy and create their direct engagement during the test.

The other essential element was the voluntariness of both managers and colleagues to test  smart working. This was important because they participated in the test very convinced and  motivated and therefore their motivation convinced even the least motivated and skeptical.

5.  Approach: describe what you could do differently next time - applying the same tool you have  selected or a different one - and the reason (s) why.

The way we managed the change worked very well and the team worked very well together.

The test allowed to verify the functioning on the field and it was not necessary to change  anything to start the whole company.

The thing that maybe I would change for the next time is to be able to involve external people  to have also different approaches that could innovate more.

