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Smart working and conciliation, how much truth is there in all this?

Posted: Tue Dec 17, 2024 7:22 am
by Aklima@4
Easter is just around the corner and thousands of workers and employers are faced with the challenge of work-life balance. Family and social commitments arise, difficulties in coordinating work days with children's school holidays... and, often, in the context of a high work pace and few days for rest. The solution? Perhaps it could be smart working .

Smart working in Spain is a major trend. Top executives agree that new times and new generations will require new ways of working . However, at the moment, most are still studying how to successfully implement this type of strategy.
Smart working is based on different pillars that seek a smarter and less present-oriented way of working. However, the situation is quite uneven in terms of progress in the different areas.

Flexible hours
Flexibility is fundamentally manifested in the parties' availability to change work schedules and conditions .

At this point, most companies make a general appeal to the possibilities of making the working day more flexible. They are aware of the benefits in terms of motivation and conciliation that this can bring to workers.

However, organizational needs and the ability to respond to changes in the environment determine the possibility of being more specific in the formulation of this flexible schedule .

Start of marked textTweet the fact! According to the INE, in Spain, only 27% of companies allow their employees to work remotely.End of marked text

However, some companies are offering the possibility of changing the schedule for part of the workday. The most common mechanism is to give the possibility of choosing, within a limited range, the start time . The end time would be determined by the time at which the employee starts on each specific workday.

At the moment, when specific agreements are reached on flexible working hours, they are mostly linked to special situations such as, for example, maternity , care of minors or the elderly, disability or illness or accidents that do not cause temporary incapacity for work .

Therefore, to date, flexible working hours are not widely engineering email list seen as a way of reconciling work and personal schedules in areas such as social commitments related to Easter . However, given that the appeals made to flexible working hours are usually quite generic, it is true that it is possible to study on a case-by-case basis whether part of the workload can be shifted to other times in order to make both areas compatible.

Technological tools and changes in processes
Smart working requires smart tools . One of the common causes of decreased performance in workers is bottlenecks that prevent tasks from progressing smoothly. At some point in the company's processes, circumstances arise that are insufficiently anticipated or that we are unable to resolve.

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The result is that time moves forward, but employees' professional work is stuck. Objectives are not achieved and employees focus on solving problems associated with the bottleneck , which becomes a real time thief. Company costs rise and the balance between work and private life is threatened.

Smart working is based on the use of technological tools that prevent this type of situation. For example, it is closely linked to the use and improvement of teamwork . It requires solutions that connect the different members of a group, but also professionals from different departments .