Mid-pandemic last year I reported growing Smarter Working know-how but lagging adoption from an employer perspective, stressing the urgent need for leadership education. Reading the ongoing debates around 1, 2 or 3 days in the office, I am rather concerned about ongoing oversimplified approaches. But hey, Rome was not built in a day.

This year, I focus on Smarter Workers of all sorts, including freelancers and entrepreneurs. During the pandemic all were blessed with more autonomy, had to learn about new tools & technology plus new workspace settings... kicking off the new worklife. Many quickly realised fundamental shifts were occurring, prompting reflections on the meaning, purpose, value and essence of work. Their voices were heard loud and clear, per Leesman Insights: 75% not wanting to return to their office workspaces and 60% admitting their homes didn’t support focus or virtual teamwork, lacking privacy and suffering poor acoustics.

The hybrid work debate around Space Flexibility is unabated: how many days should one spend in the office versus at home, on average. How many times do we have to repeat that it depends on the type of job and personal situation? And yes, it’s hard for facility managers to plan for that. It’s obvious that much less office space will be needed. But professionals better get their act together for proper distributed work, driven by disciplined rituals, performed in optimised studio spaces, ideally set in places with abundant nature.

The other hot discussion is around Time Flexibility: how much and often do we work?

A 4-day workweek? or fast forward to just 4 hours? Surely the debate should be around how the time is spent, with solid productivity and good value generation.

That’s relatively easy to measure for blue collar and transactional administrative work, but tougher for know-how efforts. Whatever the outcome of those never-ending diatribes,

Smarter Workers must shape up to become VIPs (Virtual Interactive Professionals) performing really well as Value-Add Ninjas, catching good pay. You don’t want to suffer questions about your contributions, let alone suffer the consequences of out of sight, out of mind.

So what’s smart work all about then? Let’s distill know-how work activities and their artifacts down to Smarter Working Rituals where great value is realised consistently. Not just creating and sharing it, but getting it used by colleagues and customers to great satisfaction.

Thanks Philip Flaxton, CEO of Work Wise UK for mentoring me and many others relentlessly over 15 years. I couldn’t be more fortunate to live and work in the UK whilst Smarter Working blossomed. Authorities like Philip Ross and Jeremy Myerson of WorkTECH, Tim Oldman and Annie Leeson of LEESMAN and Andy Lake of Smart Flexibility blessed me with great insights and actionable advice to produce award winning workplaces across Europe. It was my duty to share the journey and best practice with Guy Clapperton in the Smarter Working Manifesto in five languages.

The proverbial phone rang off the hook early last year when new work dynamics were needed to deal with a pandemic of never experienced proportions: any recommendations Philip ?! It was sobering to learn that Smarter Working is still a niche, as evidenced in low search volumes beyond UK, the Netherlands and Italy. And recent academic research reported that Activity Based Working hasn’t reached general management nor boardrooms. Not to speak of the poor office workspace ratings gathered by LEESM AN in comparing to the better home work settings. Employers are warned: give us more productive and healthier offices as home is the new benchmark. Awareness, consideration and serious Smarter Working adoption has yet to hit the majority of European Countries. But you’d be surprised to hear that hard-working Poland is embracing smart working with unseen devotion ! It’s all there to be applied, we just need better marketing and education.

Good time then to flash back and forward, taking stock of what was accomplished and is yet to be done.

In the beginning.

For me, what happened around the pandemic last year is rather déjà vu. As MD of Plantronics EMEA (now Poly), the 2008 financial crisis catapulted me into Agile Working with a Less is More project. What started as a space (and cost reduction) program turned into a big reflection on ways of working. As one of the first Leesman workplace satisfaction survey customers I learned that our offices were out of date and had poor acoustics, our collaboration tech was too diverse and needed integration. And our leadership styles were well ‘behind the times’ too.