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There are different opinions on smart working, even among top managers. Not said out loud, because one sentence is enough to displease thousands of people at once and workers like this method: it reduces the so-called commuting and the time – as well as the costs – which wastes every day and allows you to better reconcile life and work , restoring large private spaces thanks to flexibility. Compared to the pandemic phase, the numbers have decreased, but today, according to data from the Milan Polytechnic Observatory, there are still 3.5 million smart workers, almost seven times more than pre-Covid. And among these there are also managers, such as Gianfranco Chimirri who is chief people officer of Sace, the financial insurance group controlled by the Mef, led by CEO Alessandra Ricci where around a thousand knowledge workers work. Professionally, the manager grew up in a large multinational consumer goods company where there is an approach according to which «the workplace is not where you are, but what you do and the value you create. The concept of hybrid leader is a theme that must be clear to everyone in today’s world where physical presence in a place is not always vital, thanks also to new technologies. If anything, it is vital to understand where to work based on the activity that needs to be done”, says Chimirri.
The manager model
Chimirri already has a long career behind him, despite his young age, 48. We hear him on the phone while he is returning to Rome by train, with a somewhat precarious connection that forces us to hop from one phone call to another. He tells us that he has a model for himself. «I try to spend time in the office with colleagues for activities related to innovation and idea creation, discussions on projects, development conversations with people. But also for all the initiatives to create a sense of belonging after and before the meetings. It has been proven that spending 40% of your time in the office is the ideal measure to keep the social capital of organizations alive.” However, when he has to do what he calls focus activities, that is, studying, reading and writing documents, then he does them «where I think best. At home or while travelling, where I find a dimension to concentrate.” The hours of today’s train journey were dedicated precisely to focus. This model that he tells us evidently has a logic that is linked to the company whose human resources he leads and where the experimentation of a large flexibility package that includes both smart working and short weeks is underway. But there’s more.
The new leadership and the value of external contamination
In fact, there is also a theme of leadership. «The logic of spending 5 days in the office is against one of the principles of contemporary leadership: the leader cannot always be in the office, dmust be connected with the outside world, interact with customers, the academic world, start-ups, new technologies, travel, learn, expose oneself to ideas and suggestions that exist outside, to then contaminate and bring added value within the ‘organization. Extremes never work and the hybrid model must be balanced. It is no longer a value to work for 5 days in the office today, in the same way that it is no longer a value to always work, 100% from home, also because people’s well-being is affected and it generates total emotional disengagement with the organization, so the worker does what he does in an aseptic manner. He does it for his company, but he could do it the same way for any other.” Companies are also communities, in which people identify themselves by shared values. The great difficulty of Italian organizations was precisely «that of not having raised a generation of hybrid leaders, capable of trusting people and delegating. If the leader is not hybrid and spends 5 days out of 5 in the office, he will never create a hybrid culture because the model that he represents and that people are inspired by is different.”
Work-life balance
The past is made up of models where rigid entry and exit times, clocking in and presence on site prevailed. The present, however, offers multiple ways of working where «people can organize their time independently. This is an inestimable value”, says Chimirri who is the father of two children and is a former triathlon athlete. «Now I don’t compete anymore but I continue to train almost every day, in the morning at dawn and I manage to make space for my family, to accompany the children to school on some days, or to eat with them or to also be simply present in the house. Managers work long hours, but a model like ours allows them to avoid the frustrations of not being able to do certain things that are important to their private lives. It certainly depends on the day, but if I can, one afternoon I can also decide to take my daughter to the swimming pool and then go back to work after dinner. In a flexible model this can be done, avoiding creating frustration in people of not being able to experience an important moment.”
Emotional disengagement and Sace’s path
«We are living in an era of strong emotional disengagement between workers and companies with the consequence that it is becoming increasingly difficult to retain people and attract them. Or, worse still, you end up with disengaged people with strong repercussions on productivity. And then we cannot forget the weight of the demographic factor which leads to an increasingly scarce offer from a quantitative point of view”, says the manager. «At Sace we decided to work first and foremost on the fundamental issues – he explains -. The first is the search for meaning, the purpose because it is necessary for the person to recognize that their contribution is directly functional to the company vision: this is increasingly felt and, especially for the new generations, it is non-negotiable.” The constraint of organizations into too rigid patterns has shown many weaknesses, especially in the post-pandemic period. «People ask us for well-being in a framework that gives freedom. Highly regulated and prescriptive models are associated with mistrust. In other words, in traditional models, managers do not trust people and therefore say when they come in, when they go out and what they have to do. This doesn’t work anymore. Once we had clarified the value and strategic context of the company, we asked our people to move freely and responsibly in compliance with the values, which obviously cannot be violated. In a context of widespread leadership. We are all leaders because we all have the ability to make things happen: this is why we have decentralized decision making and changed the role of the senior leader.” How? «The role is no longer that of telling people how to do things but of inspiring them on purpose, of engaging not only their minds but also their hearts, of indicating the strategic direction and then of being of support as a coach. A very different model from control and command”, says the manager.
