Smart Working: Creating the Next Wave

It is more possible than ever to influence and shape our working environments, our experience of work and each other. Business leaders who set the conditions and create engaging, meaningful work through organisational design and use of the knowledge and creative potential of their workforces are engaging in smart working.

In Smart Working: Creating the Next Wave, Anne Marie McEwan explains how smart working is more than just flexible and mobile working. It is about flexibility and autonomy - how people work, not just where and when. She argues that systems, working environments and governance are more likely to lead to effective performance if they maximise self-determination and choice. She describes how collaborative communication technologies create possibilities for stimulating and harnessing collective intelligence, within and beyond organisational boundaries. In short, smart working is an outcome of designing organisational systems that are good both for business and people.

McEwan warns that the tendency to talk about new management paradigms risks overlooking insights derived from years of academic research, and particularly from lessons learned from process innovation methodology. This rigorously researched but intensely practical book examines current workplace trends relating to people, technology, place and space. It reviews what we already know about effective management and high performance work methods and shows how those insights can be used to advantage in contemporary workscapes.

It will help those with responsibilities for the strategic direction of their organizations. Learning and development and HR professionals will understand how to interpret these insights for their own business.

About the Author

Anne Marie McEwan is CEO of The Smart Work Company Ltd, which combines practical work-based learning and new management thinking to help senior practitioners make the transition to new ways of working. She is a visiting fellow at Kingston University Business School, is an Associate Tutor with Chester University on the Work Based and Integrative Studies programme (WBIS), and she is a member of the UK Work Organisation Network.

Dr McEwan has researched and worked with businesses making the transition to new ways of working, across different sectors. She co-facilitates US-based Johnson Controls' Global Mobility Network, a learning network for senior IT, FM and HR executives, where her work has included tracking workplace trends. Her doctoral studies at Cranfield University explored how manufacturing companies design organisational systems to encourage, support and harness the contribution of operator tacit knowledge in business process innovation.