Smartworking: needs and opportunities?

Once Aristotle, the most famous Greek philosopher, wrote in his Politics “man is a social animal” beacause he tends to aggregate with other humans being and he needs to create society to survive. But sociality is a primary instinct or is the result of other needs.

The experiment that all employees, managers and entrepreneurs are doing in this moment, by Covid-19 emergency, with the entrance of smartworking, what kind of impact is having on the quality of work regarding the need for sociability?

I certainly believe that this relational point is one most affected by smartworking: there is no more daily work with colleagues, none head to head comparison, or sharing meetings, or even a sharing coffee together in the office or a post-working reliability.

There is no possibility of leaving the house, no possibilty devoting a good part of our time to a passion or to experience inside work place. Many people fail to take care of themselves, of their personal hygiene.

In addiction, there is an important tecnological limitation.

We can not hide it: nobody was ready to switch from office mode to home work mode. There are many problems, like the internet line, of available bandwidth of systems to connect to in order to verify or update information. Few of us have a powerful internet fiber. Everyday companies systematically try different tools to video calls: skype, team, hangout, zoom basic version and / or premium version. We passed most of the time of the meeting understanding the words spoken by the various interlocutors because of line problems and it is never possible to fix in the established times.

Others problematic aspects of smartworking is having silence while you are sourrounded by the family and the children and also having the right concentration during the job at home to avoid making mistakes, providing partial and incomplete information or forgetting commitments made.

Therefore, in this context, stating smartworking like the new operating mode tomorrow let me puzzled. The experience that we are conducting is an excellent test to understand if we are ready for this novelty psychologically, if we have the temper and the technological point of view.

Optimizing our work environment is surely everyone's dream and the opportunities offered by smartworking go in this direction, but it should be supported by normal office life, even away from our beloved family members, to allow individuals to maintain their own independent and parallel existence, and continue to also learn from your neighbors.

Last but not least, I believe that the Italians, by mentality and also thanks to our extraordinary climate, are a people more inclined than others to human contact and socialization. Confining ourselves at home therefore does not give an opportunity to vent our culture and our vision of social relations.

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