Transforming the Workplace: Smart Work Centers as the new frontier of remote work arrangements

The development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has significantly contributed to transforming traditional workplaces and work practices; indeed it is increasingly frequent that organizations allow their employees to work remotely, i.e. at a distance from the office and generally to freely choose where (places) and when (time) to carry out the assigned activities (spatio-temporal flexibility). This resulted in a growing interest showed in last decades both from academics and practitioners towards different typologies of remote work arrangements, including telework, homework, mobile work, virtual teams and more recently smart work. Furthermore, over the last few years both private and public managers has started to acknowledge the potential advantages offered to employees and organizations by a new form of remote work arrangements and a new workplace, namely the "Smart Work Center" (SWC). It refers to a shared and collaborative space where the main users, i.e. public and private employees of different organizations, can flexibly access and work outside organizational boundaries taking advantage from the availability of a variety of communication and collaboration services (e.g. computers, printers, fax, internet access) next to additional services (e.g. conference rooms, recreational facilities). Although the first projects of SWC realized in the cities of Amsterdam and Seoul date back to 2006, to date it has not yet build up a solid organizational and managerial literature on this emerging phenomenon, differently to what happened for two other typologies of shared workspaces, telecenters and co-working spaces respectively. In order to fill this gap and advance the current knowledge about SWCs, the authors aim at providing a comprehensive conceptualization of these collaborative workspaces so as to build a solid ground for future theory development, empirical investigation and policy development. In particular, we show how SWCs can be viewed as a potential driver for boosting the diffusion of remote work arrangements beyond another more known but controversial form, notably homeworking. To this end it is firstly provided a broad overview of SWCs by describing their features, functions and drivers. In this respect, based on existing documentation concerning some SWC realized worldwide and considered to be best practices (e.g. Samsung Villages, Cisco, Corea), they have been identified a variety of goals, targets along with a different range of services in existing SWCs. Subsequently, by drawing on existing literature on telecentres and collaborative co-working spaces the authors discuss similarities and differences with SWCs and emphasize that, although SWCs can be positioned in continuity with these two innovative workspaces, they reflect a new business model - mainly in terms of contents of activities - that combines and revitalizes elements already characterizing the two cited workspaces. In particular, SWCs can be considered as an evolved form of telecentres, since their emergence is mainly driven by technological innovations and the spread of a new culture of "smart work". Furthermore, unlike co-working spaces, SWCs consider their main users the employees of private companies and public organizations, and not only professionals and entrepreneurs, usually self-employed belonging to the creative class (e.g. architecture, design). Similarly to co-working spaces, SWCs attach high importance to networking and to the collaborative opportunities offered to workers. However, collaboration assumes a more complex meaning in SWCs, going beyond the idea of "working side by side", that is typical of traditional office spaces; it also includes the concept of "working together", that is the essence of co-working spaces. Indeed, in SWCs co-working becomes a component of a complex "interconnected way of working" both in physical and virtual spaces and not limited to a single organization: exploiting the potentialities of existing technologies, it is allowed to amplify connections among individuals (physically close or distant), belonging to different organizations, through nascent groups, communities of practice or informal networks. This process is clearly beneficial for employees and also for organizations. The analysis of existing projects of SWCs allowed to identify a number of economic, social and environmental advantages deriving from these collaborative spaces for employees, their organizations and society. Most of them (e.g. better work-life balance, increased productivity, reduction in pollution, etc.) largely overlap with the benefits that literature attributed to other typologies of remote work arrangements. However, especially compared to telework, it is plausible to assume an optimistic development of SWCs that may contribute to sustain the process of workplace trasformation towards higher levels of spatio-temporal flexibility. In this regards SWC allows to overcome, or at least to significantly reduce, many of those "barriers" that have so far impeded the adoption of teleworking; e.g. SWCs can offer a solution to inadequate organizational ICT equipments or to a lack of workspaces at home. Furthermore, SWCs may be viewed as an effective solution to address some key managerial issues arising by "physical distance" and particularly relevant in the context of remote working. In this regard, SWC are potentially able to increase the propensity of managers to implement remote working in their organizations since they enable more effective management for key business areas, such as organizational control and communication and knowledge management. Indeed SWC can facilitate the monitoring of distant employees through the exploitation of control mechanisms different from direct supervision, notably self control, peer control and professionalism. At the same time, through working in SWC, employees can gradually change their (usually negative) attitude towards control technologies, so that they can start looking at phone calls not as instruments of surveillance, nor meetings as ineffective tools for discussion and dialogue with colleagues and supervisors. Concerning issues related to knowledge transfer, SWCs encourage interaction, networking and a collaborative-oriented culture - also thanks to specific layout and/or by the support of a dedicated staff; these initiatives can sustain the development of an employee's positive attitude towards intra-organizational collaboration, i.e. effective communication and knowledge transfer with other colleagues of the same organization, also acting as gatekeeper of organizational knowledge.