Our job takes up an important part of our day. It’s a crucial element in people’s satisfaction. Taking care of the place we work in, is equally important. In a time when the focus is on agile work, we reflect every single day on what it means to be agile in our job and we work hard in building it. Clear and shared strategies, a diffuse culture, appropriate and modern spaces, balanced policies allow us to work smart wherever we are. In our offices, at the client’s, at home.
Beta 80 has chosen to open our offices where the business is and/or where our collaborators are. In some cases, indeed, we have chosen to start a place in order not to eradicate professionals and guarantee our presence in the territory. We have always opted for managing spaces evolutions taking into consideration our growth, the main trends and suggestions from changing contexts. The spaces of today can not be the spaces of yesterday: ways to work keep changing, and so do people’s needs.
We are constantly at the search of new layouts, ways and tools favoring collaboration and a closeness feeling, reducing distances and encouraging the growth of solid and effective relationships. This is why our offices are mainly open-spaces, with the addition – wherever possible – of meeting rooms to encourage teamwork, call rooms to help people make phone calls while not disturbing others, and informal spaces to favor sharings. Our Milan office also offers a silent room welcoming everyone needing to focus on tasks requiring a high level of concentration.
To design remote working solutions in 2019 meant for us to work on different assets covering organization, technologies, physical layouts of spaces and culture. We have been seeing for a long time the importance of working in that direction, offering an integrated approach, not neglecting any factor and considering the business needs, together with people’s. This is how, while spaces have been evolving, we started a conversation about our business tools for communicating and sharing, and we came to the set up of a policy and a deep work on our company’s culture.
The questions we started our conversation from are: what’s our approach now, and how we wish it would change? How do we want to encourage the building of long-term work relationships? What could our solutions be to guarantee people’s settling and growth? To answer those, we worked to build a company culture that sees remote working as a useful option allowing our professionals to work wherever they are. This sets trust and accountability as keystones for our collaborators daily work. To build this culture, we offered a multi-step path, involving the middle-management as well as all of our collaborators, together with external panelists and guests.
21st of February 2020: a day we won’t easily forget. We had to rapidly plan an answer to the chapter that would have become one of the hardest in Italian history: the Covid-19 emergency.
It was our duty to offer solutions to be able to work remotely in a few days, 5 days a week. We had to, to contribute to stopping the spread of a sanitary emergency that still requires to be managed.
From remote work, we turned into a working-from-home mode in a few days. Our priority was our collaborators’ safety and we wanted to help them as much as we could in facing the lockdown period.
How? We lightened bureaucracy wherever possible, improved our tools for letting people know better the status of ongoing jobs to be delivered and our commercial development, and we kept learning about tools and skills useful to enhance remote work.
Finally, we focused on listening to our employees’ needs through periodical surveys, best practices collections shared with the whole company. We gave space to a conversation with external resources to face problems in real-time and propose solutions.
It’s still an experience that’s giving us a lot to think about when it comes to Beta 80’s future ways of working. We are doing our best to optimize it.