The spirit of collaboration between the academic world and the real management sphere is becoming one of the key players in Rome Business School.
In our latest Employment Report, we collected insights from some of our partner companies, to shine a light on the future of work.
Alessandro Marangi has shared Microsoft’s new way of working: advanced work strategies, which has been a forerunner of new trends and a new management of the corporate work sector for several years now.
Among the pioneering companies in our country that adopted Smartworking is Microsoft, where the first policy dates back to 2005 and initially allowed the possibility of working outside the office for three days a month.
The initial experimentation phases did not involve all the professional figures present in the company population, only later, it was decided to expand the scale of the project, including the entire company and allowing anyone to work wherever and whenever they wanted with the consent of their manager.
The preparatory phase demanded meticulous analysis to anticipate expectations and challenges, requiring policy overhauls and cultural shifts within the organization.
In the preliminary phase aimed to clearly and exhaustively explain the purposes of smart working, to illustrate its characteristics and implementation methods in order to favor the acceptance by all Microsoft employees.
The Human Resources team had to establish the changes to be made to the policies and practices of people management that involved new conduct rules, new performance measurement systems, and career paths.
Particular attention was paid constantly to the middle managers since the effective implementation of organizational change would have depended on how they would have interpreted the initiatives and decisions of top management.
They effectively played an important role in interpreting top management decisions and gauging employee sentiments, emphasizing the strategic importance of effective change management.
The Human Resources team had to establish the changes to be made to the policies and practices of people management that involved new conduct rules, new performance measurement systems, and career paths.
HR managers pushed for cultural change sponsored by the CEO and urged the human capital present in the organization with the aim of promoting changes and improvements in the company, putting people in a position to make the best use of ICT technologies to carry out their work effectively.
According to the company, there are two words that encapsulate the essence of the new way of working: freedom, because every employee can work anywhere and anytime; responsibility, because one must be effective and achieve objectives.
It is not necessary to ask for permission from the team leader because we believe that this should be the employee’s coach and not the controller. The company has invested from the beginning in a progressive change process that has not been limited to a simple work-life balance and corporate welfare initiative but has been managed in a structured manner through a shared action roadmap with the entire organization.
The CEO works in an open space like all the people belonging to the organization, and at every meeting he organizes, he expects involvement in person or remotely. It is important in the implementation of an agile work project, the involvement of the entire staff, especially top management, who as sponsors must constantly motivate the organization and set an example in every phase of the project.
Smartworking not only promoted work-life balance but also aligned with Microsoft’s global strategy of eco-sustainability.
The approach translated into a more flexible and responsible organization of work, a new centrality of the person who is made responsible for the results and rewarded based on the individual contribution to achieving business objectives and qualitative elements such as collaboration with colleagues.
Most of the employees leave their cars at home and reach the office by public transport, thanks also to agreements on subscriptions that are among the company benefits. And more traditional concepts of human resource management related to the direct association of productivity with the quantity of hours worked or physical presence in the offices have been set aside.
All employees are equipped with technological tools (laptop, smartphone, wireless connection, communication and collaboration solutions integrated with Office 365 and Skype for Business, platforms like Teams and Yammer) that allow people to work effectively from anywhere, internally or externally to the company.
All smart workers undergo mandatory training on the correct use of all the technologies they are provided with, including tools for cybersecurity.
The culture of results, with the overcoming of strict supervision; to evaluate the efficiency of human capital, a precise analysis of the results of work is indispensable, which must pass through the individual measurement of the objectives achieved.
“Microsoft believes work is something you do… not somewhere you go” is an emblematic phrase that expresses the company’s approach: “Microsoft believes in what you are doing and not where you are carrying out your work activity.”
This is just one of the many insights offered by companies that collaborate directly with the Rome Business School.
If you, too, want to expand your expectations and become an excellent entrepreneur of the future, consult our Masters and International MBA catalogue for more information!
