Smart working means I have 100% of my life under control, more time for my family, I can get some exercise, eat more healthily and cook for my little girl. Now we’re together at home 24 hours a day.
Since the onset of the Covid-19 health emergency the majority of the Acea Group’s staff have been smart working.
“Pink walls, colorful stickers on the walls, lots of little toys and a desk: my daughter’s bedroom has been turned into my new office. I’ve left the kitchen to my husband”.
Francesca is Acea Elabori’s Process Manager and since national lockdown for the Covid-19 health emergency began she has been working at home every day. “We got organized in order to have everything we need to manage meetings and ordinary work day commitments”, explains Francesca. Smart working has become everyday life for millions of people, even though just a few weeks ago many had heard of it but few had tried it.
Smart working means I have 100% of my life under control, more time for my family, I can get some exercise, eat more healthily and cook for my little girl. Now we’re together at home 24 hours a day.
“I was already smart working once a week so that I could take my daughter to school and as this is impossible all other days, it was a great deal for me”, explains Francesca.
At Acea Francesca is responsible for making the business tools which enable staff to work in a flexible, simplified way available to colleagues and individual business units.
“With my team we are working hard to ensure that everyone can do their jobs and achieve their goals in the best way possible, including at a distance”. The current circumstances constitute a great “dress rehearsal” for massive use of smart working. On a company level Acea Group is reaping the rewards of work moved forward via technology implementation, training and joint working between the various business units, a trajectory set in motion in 2018 with the advent of the Smart People project. Over the last two years the firm has invested a great deal in the managerial culture of its people to foster trust, autonomy and a sense of responsibility at all levels.
“Technology has helped us in this sense too: in our unit we were already using the cloud and the web-call tools made available by the Acea Group. So we didn’t struggle over the shift to remote working”, explains Giuseppe Morone, Acea Elabori’s Business Process Improvement Unit manager.
The goal is to enable all Acea’s people to work more innovatively, more flexibly.
“I call it accelerated Digital Academy: many of our staff have always worked at the office. This isn’t possible for everyone at the moment and so we have had to adapt our routines and use the various available digital systems which not everyone had tried. The experience is giving us an insight into the fact that part of our work can easily be done remotely, such as back office tasks”, underlines Giuseppe.
Changing habits from one moment to the next has not been easy, above all for those not used to working from home, who perhaps prefer the office. To support all colleagues as much as possible, a dedicated smart working area has been set up, together with Talent Garden, within Acea Group’s e-learning platform, featuring training titbits and mentoring sessions focusing on the new approach in both managerial and operational terms.
Having set out specific and long term goals around smart working has enabled the firm to take on this challenge successfully. The next goal is to involve all company areas in an increasingly digital vision.
The opportunities offered by digitalization are increasingly evident. The present gives us an even clearer view of the opportunities offered by digital tools.