 So, welcome everybody to the first master speakers series of the academic year 2020-2021. And I would like to give the virtual floor to Matteo. Thank you. Thank you, Stefano, and thank to Brock College for inviting me. I'm really honored to be the first speaker of this cycle of lessons and to open the school year. Really, thank you. Thank you very much. First, let me say a few words about myself, of course Italian, as you can maybe understand from my accent, and I've been living in Prague, in Czech Republic, and working at the Italian Czech Chamber of Commerce since 2007, and I graduated in law, I have a specialization in economic relationship with Eastern countries that the time included in Czech Republic, so sorry for that, and I'm finalizing my MBA at the University of Prague. I'm not an expert of smart working, but we had to investigate about smart working because it is the most important revolution, really radical revolution that impacted all companies, more or less all over the world in really a short time. You can see here the last release of McKinsey about the acceleration due to COVID realizing in 2020. You can see how companies had to speed up with processes of digitalization and the first element of this chart is remote working and remote collaboration. So why are we online today? Why are we sitting at the beautiful premises of Prague College and we watch each other face to face, of course because of COVID and it impacted negatively our personal lives, our professional lives, but as all the general and wide phenomenons, it also has been bringing positive impacts. One of these is the acceleration of digitalization, that is not, of course, an element linked only to smart working, but it accelerated by 43 times the realization of the smart working process. I think this trend is not reversible, so we must understand it first of all, and that's what we're trying to do today and what the Chamber of Commerce tried to do some weeks ago with the survey, the survey will be analyzed together in a few minutes and second we need to react according to our goals. Just a very brief introduction, when we talk about smart working, what we talk about? What is smart working? There's not a univocal definition in the European Union, but we have a definition at European level. So the European Parliament focused on smart working relating to the work-life balance. Also in a wide resolution of 2016, inviting countries, members of the European Union to welcome and to facilitate work-life balance speaks about smart working as a combination of flexibility, autonomy and collaboration. This is the focus of the European Union. The first law in the EU about flexible working, about smart working is from the UK in 2014 and it's called the flexible working regulation. All other countries somehow are adapting to this EU regulation and slowly are introducing specific rules. The Italian one is one of the most advanced and detailed, I would say Italy always has a law about the situation, it also has about smart working and I highlighted in red what in my opinion is the element of legislation and I think it's interesting to see that Italy highlights the absence of constraints of time and space, so independency, agreement that is necessary between the employer and two main goals of the legislation to promote work-life balance and at the same time, and this is not secondary, increase the productivity of employees, which is pretty ambitious, I would say, because we can say, and this is the question of our survey, it does really smart working enhance productivity. We will see, what about Czech Republic, Czech law is much more synthetic and brief compared to the Italian one and it just mentioned the smart working, not exactly smart working but something that we can call smart working or flexible working in section 317 on the Czech Labor Code to say that the Czech Labor legislation shall apply also to situation of smart working, I would say, which are the situation when an employee does not work at the employer's workplace, so workplace flexibility, and has independency about working time, so he organizes himself, organizes the schedule of the day, and after that, at least some exceptions for extra time and so on that are not relevant in this discussion, but I leave all the presentation in case of your interest, so just says that if you work, is not working, the Czech Labor Code anyway shall apply, so as you can see, I just took three loads about smart working and you see three different points of view and three different definitions, but when we go from legislation to organization to real life, I would say, the real management of companies, what is smart working? What does it entail? Many aspects, so many endless, I would say, we start with the virtual workplace, so home office, so many teams, employees or colleagues distributed in many locations, digitalization, it's the big, huge issue that is not only related to smart working, but that is absolutely necessary to realize smart working. So cloud, interactive tools, teams, Skype, Zoom, whatever, meetings, virtual customer experience, how is the customer ready to accept our virtuality? What can we do to improve our message? What can we do to improve our value? Share desk, layouts, many things, all this is smart working, in my opinion, the real issue of smart working is flexibility, where, how to organize the work, time, tasks, benefits, we can find flexibility in really many, many aspects. We know flexibility since years, decades is a key issue for every company, especially in production company, but also for services, company, business services sector need to be flexible, but we know the flexibility from the production point of view, if we are not flexible, if we are not capable to react after receiving external inputs, we are not competitive. Now we talk about flexibility from an internal point of view. So companies left the model, take it or leave it, this is my model, you are the employee, you need to accept my pattern, if you don't like it, please use your talent somewhere else. Now companies try to adapt to employees' needs, and we have to understand if companies do that only to give a benefit to the employees, to improve the work-life balance, or if there is also a possible further level, that is the increase of the performance. And this is a question, this is a big issue, I'd like to also discuss later with the panelists, because of course we don't have a univocal answer for this. But internal flexibility is, in my opinion, the central element, the key element of smart work. Without flexibility, we cannot talk about smart working, maybe we can talk about remote working, telecommuting, home office, but to get the extra level of smartness, let's say like that, flexibility is an element. If we remain at the organizational level, some authors and academics have many definitions, several models, I like this one, three elements that include the smart working, which is the IC element, so you need an ICT based infrastructure efficient, HR element, new models, you don't meet every day, you don't meet each other, you don't control physically all the elements and the members of the team, so new organizational models and layout elements. So do we really need the offices, the layout, the dimension of the spaces that we were using 10 years ago, five years ago, before COVID, or we maybe need smaller offices with shared areas for different ways to work? Three elements that need to be considered when implementing smart work. We decided as a Chamber of Commerce with our survey to investigate the second element and to ask companies if they are using forms of smart working, why and how, because if you read newspapers, I just collected some Italian English and Czech newspapers and you see that it's a universal trend, that it's real, the revolution that will solve all our problems, all our employees' problems and will increase, will boost the performance. Is it true? Of course, I don't think it's true, I tell you, right now, because nothing is universally positive or negative and if you don't plan, if you don't prepare and if you don't tailor the project according to your needs, you will rarely be successful. So we realized a survey, we distributed a survey among our members and outside our members and we closed the survey when we got 150 responses and we think it's a relevant number to take some conclusions and to open some possible discussions. So why we did it, of course, to take a picture of the situation, but also because as a Chamber we need to react to the events and to the external inputs and it's important to us to understand if and where companies are struggling and are maybe facing some bottlenecks and we can, of course, react and to offer them training, education and cooperation in some possible sensitive aspects. Almost 90% of the companies responding to the survey are in Czech Republic so it's mainly relevant for this country and most of them are international. It's interesting for us that we got answers and we have been able to include in the survey also a relevant share of large companies and medium-sized companies. Almost 40% because it's interesting to analyze if there are differences between small, medium-sized companies and large companies in the implementation of, let's say, managerial tools or projects. According to the sectors, we can say also the share of different sectors is quite complete and we can include services as well as industry and commerce. I would say also from this point of view, the picture is quite faithful and the respondents are decision makers so we can relate on a relevant capacity from respondents to analyze this issue. Coming to the first question, we prepared two different surveys, one, of course, with different questions, one for the companies who have experience and are implementing smart working and the second one for companies with no experience about smart working. Sorry, I go back. The majority, so the revolution has started. Is it true that, let's say, an important majority of companies have to face this situation and remove to a job or smart working somehow? And so the first question is why did you start to implement smart working? We can say that more than half of the companies that have experienced before COVID had, it implies they had to quickly adapt to the situation and to react in very few days to the COVID pandemic. Less than 30% started in smart working as part of a business strategy somehow or as an improvement of operations, so a minority. 16% considered smart working as a benefit. They can just add maybe and leave it to the discussion later but just to make a comment. I don't believe smart working is a benefit. Maybe the respondents exchange the meaning of smart working with the home office or remote working somehow because it is necessary always to match the smart working including the home office with the business goals and the business strategy. If the employees have the perception that it's a benefit so you can stay home, it can be a benefit. It can bring positive consequences to your life, improve the work-life balance and to help you to mitigate the stress of commuting and other positive aspects. I think it's a mistake to exchange it as a benefit or to present to the employees as a benefit. The same question to the managers who didn't experience the smart working and why. Many reasons but if you put together the answers, 67% of respondents believe they're not capable to sustain this process successfully because they don't have the proper mentality because the organization is not ready because it will bring a negative impact. So quite negative expectation about this possible. After that we ask the companies with experience what are the challenging elements and parts of the process they experience in implementation of the smart working and surprisingly or not, it depends, IT is not considered a bottleneck or so sensitive compared to the HR elements. If you put together all the elements related to HR, we get almost 80%, 77% including the HR support. So it means maybe the smart working is more an organizational issue rather than a technical one. In my opinion, IT is a prerequisite. I would define it like that as well as the legal frameworks or the compliance with the legislation. It's a prerequisite. Without a proper IT infrastructure, it's impossible to be competitive nowadays. A company cannot be efficient, cannot collect data, cannot talk to maybe international network of customers or suppliers, branches abroad. So digitalization is a long-term trend. It didn't start with COVID of course and is not related to smart working or remote working. The same question for the companies with no experience. So we can compare the reality with the perception of the issue. So what you fear more, what you think it's more relevant and we can see the IT is a little more important in this situation. So maybe the companies who didn't experience the IT, the smart working is less prepared technologically, is less ready. But on the other side, the perception of the HR element is relevant. So managers are ready and they received the perception the organizational issue will be a key challenge in the process. And the mother of all the questions. How does it impact the performance? Is your company more productive with smart working? No. The answer is no. So it's not exactly the same what we were reading in the papers before. We are more productive. Companies are more efficient with smart working. Managers, CEOs, owners don't have this. We can see that the share of companies with the positive impact is exactly the same negative impact. And so why? As I was saying, we always find enthusiastic articles, comments, blogs, research about smart working. Mainly because these articles are based on surveys about smart working, asking the employees and also the middle management if they judge their own performance improved or decreased. And of course, smart working, flexibility, brings an impact on engagement, on commitment. You change your routine. You are more engaged. You feel more confident. You receive more responsibility from your manager. You have the impression you are more productive because you are active, maybe. And even if you are really more productive because you are happier, you have more time for yourself. You commute less and you enjoy 30%, 40%, 50% of your time outside office. We can read many research that are agreeing about the fact that this effect is generally limited in time. And the relation between flexible work and satisfaction and so between flexible work and commitment is not linear. It's upside down U-shaped. So it increases and in a determined time, it decreases. And of course, it depends on the sector, on the companies, on the capacity of management to engage the team. But it's quite general. Same when we go to ask managers with no experience, we find very similar situations or a picture of the reality which is aligned with the real experience. In general, we can say managers with no experience are even more pessimistic, I would say. So only 11% believe that they can take an advantage of smart working and to finish some questions about how they manage. So specific policy for smart working is rare. Only like 36% of companies have a specific policy share with all the employees. Very few companies changed the pattern of KPIs for the employees. And I think it's not necessary for all companies, for all the organizations to change the KPIs. Maybe you change KPIs when you move towards an activity-based, a target-based organization and measurement of the result. So it can help to define the KPIs in a more appropriate way, also in general, so more measurable. But otherwise, I don't think it should bring a relevant impact. The same for tools measuring the performance of employees and their smart working. Just almost 30% of companies have it. And also in this situation, if the company has an activity-based result-oriented system to measure the performance of the employees, maybe a specific tool or software is not that relevant. Of course, we know that companies active in project management, softwares or agencies with customers and very specific projects are using monitoring systems to understand how much time is dedicated to single customer to single project. So in this case, it's not relevant if the employee is sitting at the office or somewhere else. It's more related to the system of project management. And very, very lastly, we thought it was interesting to try to match the aptitude and approach of the company to innovation, improvement of the quality as a method, as a general approach of the company, and to relate it with the smart working. Because in the end, it's part of improvement company's capacity and company's competitiveness. So we found a confirmation in the sense that companies able to accept, able to introduce smart working are in general more open to innovation. So just to finish what is smart working, of course, it's not a product. It is a process. It is not suitable for all companies. It is not universal. Each company needs to design its own system and to tailor it according to its needs. It does not produce positive, neutral or negative impacts per se. So I introduce smart working. I will be more productive. No. With high probability, smart working will improve the work-life balance and the quality of life of the employees, improve the engagement, the commitment, but at the same time, it will bring a general drop of engagement in further time. Each company may find a different time for that, but it's quite physiological. Why? Because it brings a loss of soft know-how, a minor exchange of information, a lack of personal contact, and also it brings new paradigms of social interaction. So the more improver employees maybe will be more isolated and the more socially active employees will be maybe frustrated. So it's important for every manager and every owner to plan and to drive this system and to try to minimize the risks that are consistent and relevant and to take out the positive impacts that flexibility can enhance in an organization. So thank you. In my opinion, we are a human. We need the socialization. So at the end of the day, the smart working, personally, I don't believe that the smart working is an upgrade of the way of work. It's just a need. And the fact that in one of the first slides of Matteo, the 82% of the companies started to manage the smart working due to COVID is, for me, like a proof of that. I mean, if it's so smart, why we didn't start the worldwide, we didn't start to work smart in this way before the COVID. So now it's just a need. And so we should, let's say, manage in this way because we are obliged to do this in this way. But I don't think that we will be the best way to manage the work in the future. Yeah, I do agree with you, Roberto. We need socialization and talking to or touching everybody on a daily basis. But it's probably also depending on the, on each country probably, and probably also industry wise, I think I'm working on a daily basis with different industries, different companies, different size of companies. And probably there is some people who probably work more efficiently from home right now. And some other who does need to work collaboratively. So they try to find the best way to harmonize the current challenging situation by doing, because I think that at the end of the day, we spend most of the day in front of Zoom, if it's not to talk about any other web tool, Zoom teams, whatever. But I think that everybody is trying to accommodate himself to to still be efficient the way that they can. So for some people, sometimes they need to be at home. I am home, working from home, dealing with a team in Europe anyway. So you cannot travel. And so you spend more time in front of your screen anyway. Actually, AVE is and used to be forever quite distributed company. The biggest office is we have in Prague in London. However, we are having the development teams across all the Czech Republic, Slovakia and even other countries, not even speaking about the representatives, which are sitting all around Europe and US. And usually they are in a smart working from from the very beginning when they started to work for AVE. So we are maybe one of few organizations which was not that surprised by COVID, because we already had implemented all the technologies which are necessary for sort of efficient, and that's again something to be disputed a little bit, sort of efficient collaboration across the networks. So with regards to technology, we are absolutely fine. However, let's say if I speak now more in behalf of let's say the Czech office, which actually was concentrating a lot of functions from let's say the research to the development sales and also because of which too many people in a in a Prague office, we are around 100 and something and within Czech Republic all together with our collaborators, we are close to 150, 160, 160 people. So the office concentrated a lot of sort of office management, HR, personal IT supplier stuff and so on, which was all which used to be always physical. So for I would say normal performance of our jobs when we are still IT, so it's easy. Nothing has changed. What has really changed for us is let's say the setup of I would call it service functions, which changed suddenly. So from that point of view, it's fine, but I wanted to challenge, let's say this let's say work life balance versus let's say the efficient resource, efficient resource management because war life balance, I believe, well, you can see my face, so I'm not the youngest one, but that work life balance as a benefit, it works absolutely perfectly for generation Y and generations Z because they are simply about many activities, company, private, personal life, girlfriends, very young family and so on. So they really need to balance their life and for them the smart working always used to be a benefit and we were as employer selling that idea to our collaborators to be and it was always very well taken. However, it is also important to understand what these people are usually doing within the company because they are, let's say in our IT company, they are coders, testers, analysts basically, so they can very easily afford to keep working remotely using the collaborative tools like, I don't know, gyro confluence and few others, not to spend too much time on it and for them it's easy, natural and so on. What I really feel as a big lack of efficiency during the smart working is basically the cooperation, coordination on, let's say, really innovative ideas. First, second, for the innovations itself, it's extremely difficult across the smart working to balance some ideas on someone because the smart working place for me doesn't represent, let's say, wide context. You have to keep sharing these ideas with people. So I would say that in day-to-day routine as a at the end solution delivery company, it works for us pretty well. However, if I should say something to, let's say, a bit distant future, I would say that we have to come back to the offices and start normally interact with the colleagues and people because we will lose the internal motivation for the free leapfrog improvements and things like that because as individuals we are not capable of putting all that stuff together by ourselves and you have to share the experience and you have to share the collaboration with people. As you mentioned before, I run a fairly small company personal-wise because we're not so many, I don't have so many employees, but I operate in different countries and therefore I already had an IT infrastructure that allowed me to shift very quickly to what was the topic of the discussion today, so the smart working. So it didn't change too much to me in terms of IT development that was already in place, but I'm here with Philip Gagnac, he's my operations manager and I didn't bring him in just because he might look better in me and camera, but because within the same company we had a completely different perspective. So from my role was the is that of management and I have the relationship with my clients which was very easy to shift on an online platform, so that wasn't a very big deal for me, but he actually he was covering the accommodation sector of the business before and now he shifted to the operation so he has a more general overview of the whole business, but when he was running the accommodations obviously that's that's a sector that cannot really be done on smart working. Partially yes, we actually did have some infrastructure that allowed us not to be present when guests were coming, like smart blocks or items like that, but mostly it is not really possible to shift into smart workings or as you mentioned we are now running a restaurant in Prague and I can hardly ask my chef to work from home and there are sectors of business that are simply not manageable manageable and smart working, but when it comes to improving I think that this whole situation did have some positive impact on small companies like mine because maybe some of them did not invest in the past so much in in IT or I'm not necessarily talking about money investment, there are some tools that are even for free, but they were not even looking at them and implementing some of them, some basic tools can improve performance. I don't know, things that for us were kind of obvious, we always use the cloud to share documents and we've been doing that for years, but I realized that that was a fairly new tool for a lot of companies that we were working with and a lot of clients that we are working with, so I believe that that's an input that pushed and forced some companies to innovate in those sectors that can be beneficial. Doesn't mean that people have to work from home or most of the time and I hope in the future we will have more meetings in the office, some of those tools are fairly helpful I think. Well I'd like to go back to a point that Matteo made and Roberta made and also Petta made as well, if we think about smart working I think there's sometimes a tendency just to blindly go down an avenue thinking it's going to work simply because another company is doing it or the media is presenting an idea is wonderful, it's the future and you know often you know we make the mistake of just thinking oh I should do that as well in my company or whatever and I think that's a mistake, I think Matteo had a really good point, you've got to think about for your organization and what you're trying to do whether it's suitable or not and if it is to what extent it's suitable and you've got to be quite smart about that as well, I mean that's the smart part of you know smart working is what's actually going to bring benefits that's going to not take away those negatives or not produce those negatives which so much of the smart working is coming along with. If I think about my experience in education and what we've been going through it's Roberto's point, going online was a need, we had to in order to keep education going. Now there was also there's also another need that we have in terms of not every student is able to be a full-time student, not every student is able to be physically with us here in Prague at Prague College and so I think you know for the future yes we need to continue some aspect of this in a sense you know smart learning which we're doing but I think you know that's one aspect of what we do but it shouldn't be the whole aspect we should continue on with also our traditional approach which is being in the classroom for other companies being in the office and because of this socialization aspect that brings the sense of security it brings the people you know even for younger people the routines it helps them with the contact between each other with the lecturers and the sense of identity they get from the institution but I'm not saying that we shouldn't do this smart learning anything because it does meet the need of certain groups and I think we should cater for that and that's a good lesson for us from this experience but overall I think you've got to think carefully about what you're doing what you implement and why you are implementing it who are you trying to benefits because if you don't if you just go down a blind alley you're going to bring a lot of negatives and you know maybe even failure as well could you please give more details about these surveys how many managers were consulted what were they parameters when evaluating whether performance improved or not which industries are they working was there a trend in perception from one industry in comparison to another thank you I think we partially answered some of those questions in the very first part of the presentation that will be shared with all the participants of our college but the respondents were 150 and 35 percent of them were the owners of the company 40 percent CEO or general manager five percent HR manager and another 20 percent uh residual so it could be a project manager sales manager or other positions sectors the same industry 22 percent uh we just want to take it on fraction nine percent services 48 percent grade 11 percent four I got six percent and uh others four percent and what were the criteria for the measurement of the performance we we didn't set patterns because it is a general survey it was impossible for us to give instruction about productivity or performance for the sectors but what is important it's also the perception of the executives about the performance if they believe the company is more productive or not so we just asked if the company is more or less productive with with no instructions about that and the last part if there is a perception from one industry to another uh actually was surprised to see that there is not a relevant variation according to dimension of the companies and also from sector to sector of course the respondents in industry are not talking about the manufacturing part of the companies they refer to the sales to to the other parts of the company not the production sites of course as well as for restaurants we're not talking about the cooks or the of course the person who has to physically be present at the premises something irrelevant I maybe forgot to mention before is that when we talk about the impact on performance and we see that only 30 percent of companies refer to to register an improvement this data does not change according to the reason why a company implemented smart board so we could think that the companies who had implemented smart working as a strategy can benefit more compared to the others instead the the figures is the same also companies who had started it as a strategy don't register a higher variation in productivity so I really agree with Dave when saying really be careful how you start this project how you set the the rules for it because you can get the the pros but you maybe can get also the cons of the issue so this is the point thank you thank you Matteo um do you think that a cultural factor could influence any of the results presented or not of course yes uh I believe as I said that the smart working is mainly an organization an organizational issue we know that the culture has huge impact on working relationships working models management peer-to-peer relations superior subordinate relations and so on so of course I think if we agree or we don't agree but I believe flexibility is the issue the capacity of management to delegate and to deliver this flexibility to from the book to the organization to the real life is the real issue if we need to micromanage the team smart working is not for us if we can bring independency uh self-confidence into the team and we are capable to accept it maybe we can get much more than a work-life balance and from that situation we can implement the productivity the capability the self the capacity to to solve problem and the capacity of the team to solve problem without the manager and so on all these and there are many positive consequences of smart working if not we we face the problems um thank you thank you Matteo there was a question actually I invite like better to deal with it um how should companies rethink their talent strategy so that they have the people they need when they when their recovery starts I actually I I really appreciate that question because this is the question I'm asking myself for last uh last couple of months uh but uh that that's exactly it yeah because uh yes I I really think that uh we have to rethink let's say the talent seeking way how we do it now because uh at at the end uh the the problem for myself uh is uh okay you you find the talent but perfect there are the ways how to do it that's that's not such a big problem but how uh how you convert eventually that talent into talented team player rather than talented individual and uh this is something I do not have the answer for uh yeah maybe Dave could but uh I'm I'm really lost in that to be honest I don't know Dave maybe you can help I have no idea so yeah I'm I'm not sure I can um yeah I'm I you know it really depends on you know what you're looking for for the roles for positions and so on um me personally I always prefer talented team players because I think it's the team that goes somewhere yeah uh sometimes you're going to have a great talented individual but uh because they're not a team player it doesn't work well um it's a very difficult dilemma to come to terms with and understand what it is that we're really looking for um right now um for me if we think about what we've what we've been going through and how we're working for me it would be the team player because it's someone who can actually be separated from their team but can still work together with their team and collaborate cooperate contribute someone but yeah it's a difficult question to answer um thank you um if I can just the comments and Stefan I had the chance to interview many managers about this and the one important issue is hiring they don't know how to they really don't know also HR manager of really relevant groups they don't have a solution on how to realize the onboarding so I hire a junior resource and then what how how long does it take to train maybe it's interesting for students because maybe they need to face such a situation and for them they know they realize that they have a junior uh resource with no supervisor with no no soft know how it's a terrible loss for the company so they feel the problem uh most of the companies don't have an answer yet because it's not so easy but I think that we will need to go back to live soon so we will solve these problems going back to what we did before thank you another question uh was coming from a student did these companies implement any framework to smart working or did they provide training to employee on how to do it successfully on what tools to use or how often to check in what's your experience there uh from the survey most of them don't because we see that about 60 percent of the companies don't have any policies about that and I think the number is very similar to the the one related to companies forced to adopt smart working for the first time due to covid so they they didn't have time and of course you somehow you pay this situation because it's a lack of coordination and this is a very specific year and maybe some problems into companies are not not related to that you don't know if your decrease is related to maybe not perfect organization or maybe to a loss of revenues due to the crisis so it's not easy to take data from 2020 yeah but do you think it was actually because it was too fast or because it was all of a sudden and they were not prepared I mean lack of training and all this kind of type of issue yeah it was too fast after that large companies started to to make trainings webinars especially about well-being how to see it how to to leave eight hours home and not to get like sick ill physical problems but as we were saying not all the companies were ready to work three days per week remotely it takes time and there are many gaps to cover and I think companies are really quick in that what is it's a bit of a classic in the literature the management response is always slower than actually the business environment kind of input right so it takes a time to adjust especially in different sector it's a kind of I mean you don't have a theorem there but you have a lot of empirical evidence going in the past I mean it takes time to redesign everything the right management approach and at the moment actually you have almost finished the job you have a new input from the environment is actually the crucifixion of management in some sense if you want like it's a constant struggle with that is the catch-up game right so you're always late in some sense it's like kind of you know yeah and as we were saying most of the company didn't want to implement smart working and the most of them now is okay yeah the wall is down now we we faced it we can keep it no but there was a huge cultural barrier especially not especially also in Czech Republic about that because organization also large international organizations were not so ready about that it's not something that touches it's really demanding for organizations to shift from a regular office-based activity to a smart working part it's really demanding it asks all the team and the structure to change the mindset and if companies and employees don't realize that it does it's not just it's not I mean like it is demanding like in terms of really you know like a shift of mind like we think in our work and so on yeah can imagine we got in the meantime and all the question I would like to play the smart working's devil's advocate a bit and I would say the fact that the effectiveness of company was in part negatively affected because of the speed at which we were all thrown into this digital world without us being really ready for that and as we are usually scared or change now we just wait until the crisis over to go back to our normal working environment with physical offices and socializations which by the way was culturally structured but every equilibrium takes some extreme shifting so question based on your experience don't you think what we are experiencing now is not really smart working but smart working would be something that we come to in X amount of years when we know how to deal with that absolutely I perfectly agree and matches what I was saying before I think that the companies who did and that they're the majority who started smart working during COVID would never have done it without COVID or maybe they would have waited other 10 years when the market would have required it or like we let's think about multi-sport card in Czech Republic before COVID without it it's not a job offer okay it's it's necessary in every job I think slowly smart working was coming to the same situation as a benefit and I already said what I think about this approach I think it's really wrong and it brings to the long results but yes it is as every organizational key processes it takes time as I say it's not a product it's a process so what we are experiencing now if we didn't have smart working before is just the very first but it was quick and it was necessary so it's much more than a trial I think it's really an experimental version of it and after that companies will not leave or at least the most will not go back because employees like it because it's it's doable it's not that impossible how we were thinking before but the the point was before COVID why do we have to do who forces me no one also in large companies international American companies when the smart working was allowed but not mandatory so every manager could decide if allowing smart working for their team or not most of them didn't I've done interviews I don't mention the name of the companies but they didn't because it was a complication for the manager why please get up and let's meet at the office at a it's in your contract why should I complicate my life and introduce more of course I also believe otherwise it may seem I don't like it and I'm against absolutely not I started this research because I was impressed about the facility and how I was easy to get into a smart working situation and after the day after day I realized how it's complicated and how it's much more than simply stay home and work for sky and but I believe it can bring a real good impact especially in services of course and in some sectors so I would define myself a fan of smart working but I think it's necessary to understand it's demanding do you think smart working being forced upon the workforce is going to drive older managers out and allow the younger generation of managers to move up in the organization faster than they would have normally so let's have a kind of let's say I don't think so very personal opinion I don't see the reason so Mauro what do you think well there's not much space for that I would say and I feel young enough so no it's not gonna take my place anytime soon but you know I come from a maybe different background and like as I said running a smaller company put me in danger if that kind of turn over within my own company but I cannot really do you think do you think in general this could be like something happening or no like I just well again not from a very large company yeah but definitely I would say that the management should take advantage of younger mindsets to implement maybe new infrastructures new strategies but that's something they should have done anyway in any case it's not just in this instance having some fresh air coming into the management is always a wise choice no matter what the situation Roberto what do you think I don't think so I mean that there are maybe because I'm directly involved with you are smiling no no I don't think so because I think that is not question of age of the manager it's not the different way to work as much to work on video or personal there is really as I try to tell before is really a different approach so from my side the personal approach is essential and can bring benefit in the relationship and also in the business so they work in from home using technology I don't think that can help the younger generation to move on more fast I would like to thank all the panelists for taking the time to be with us actually I think it was actually a very interesting discussion and I would like to thank all the the attendee for being so numerous for this type of online event I hope I mean being generation V that one so we can have a soon one physical as we used to in our nice premises but for the time being we will enjoy the virtual one so thank you all the panelists really for spending time with us and our students I think he's extremely beneficial for the student to see people from the industry and talk into them and having their insights so thank you so much and have a good evening to everybody and looking forward to see you again for the next master speaker series bye thank you thank you very much bye