Smart Working in 2025: flexibility and competitiveness

Remote work is no longer an option, it is part of the reality molded by the learnings from the confinement imposed by COVID-19. In addition to being part of our day by day, it also represents a great challenge for companies that carry out face-to-face work, so Smart Working comes to solve this challenge, becoming the new work scheme to be implemented.

Smart Working is the evolution of remote work, since it is a new work model that seeks to combine telecommuting and new technologies. Its initial principle is to provide the work team with the necessary tools to carry out the work from anywhere, without affecting their productivity and performance.

Thanks to this work scheme, employees and companies enjoy a series of advantages. Some of them are:

• Flexibility of working schedules
• Balance in the employees work and personal life
• Substantial commuting monetary and time savings
• Uninterrupted communication thanks to technology and mobile devices
• Development of new technological and job skills
• Work for results and objectives

Behind these benefits lies a great combination of work performance and technology, making it a great alternative to maintain the competitiveness and profitability of the companies that implement it.

In this sense, there are technology solutions that cannot be missed, such as connectivity, collaboration, mobility, cybersecurity and cloud-based tools, which have become essential for carrying out Smart Working, a work scheme where employees decide their schedules, their space of work and its performance for the 2025 year.

Smart Working: more than a trend, it is a demand

This work scheme goes beyond a trend, is a model that is here to stay, a demand of collaborators who are in quest of balance in their lives.

As proof of this, a study conducted by Gartner revealed the following:

• Collaborators are 3 times more likely to be highly productive when given flexibility in where, when and how they work.
• 75% of knowledge workers (that is those professionals whose main value is the generation of ideas, such as software engineers, architects or scientists) who work under a hybrid or remote model say that their expectations of working flexibly have increased.
• 62% of knowledge workers show a clear performance growth when offered significant job flexibility, compared to 27% of those with low flexibility.
• Furthermore, 4 out of 10 employees will seriously consider leaving their current company if they are pushed to return to a face-to-face office environment.

Based on these figures and by the learning of the last two years, companies are increasingly focussed on managing their talent based on a remote work scheme, which can be easily adapted to a hybrid mode.

Likewise, one of the main challenges to be able to carry it out is to form a new work culture, where workers do not lose the sense of belonging despite the physical distance.

That is why companies are in a constant process of reinventing work, where the core is to provide flexibility opportunities for employees who want to maintain and increase their levels of competitiveness through a new organizational culture based on remote work.

Principles to implement Smart Working successfully

Contrary to what is commonly considered, it is necessary to carry out some key actions for this work modality to actually work, such as:

1. Set working conditions and communication channels between employees and employers.
2. Planning and definition of objectives according to the company's goals and strategies.
3. Provide the technological tools to carry out the functions from any place at any time.
4. Carry out control and monitoring of employee activities, thus ensuring performance and productivity.
5. Pay more attention to the mobile devices that will be used to carry out work, since implementing cybersecurity solutions will be the key to safeguarding company assets.
6. Implement an agile methodology to trace the correct path of Smart Working, since it is essential to better control the work from its planning to its execution.

By considering these pillars that support Smart Working, there is a biggest chance for success and the margin of error is greatly reduced.

Starting to focus on a business strategy based on Smart Working brings companies one step ahead in the area of talent management and market competitiveness.

At Icalia Labs we know that this trend is one of the main legacies of the last two years, since it represents the flexibility and productivity that employees and companies are looking for, beyond the physical location of the workforce.

That is why this working scheme has become a fundamental part for the icaliers that make up our work team, since their well-being and competitiveness are our main motivators and our values as a company.

Do you want to be part of our family? We invite you to enter our website and find out the vacancies we have for you. You can also find some of them on our social networks. Follow us and get ready to work in the best technology team on the market.