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.