Smart-working and work-life balance organizational policies: a case study

This study sought to improve our empirical knowledge of how employees perceive organizational policies and services such as smart working practices and their associations with employees’ Work-Life Balance (WLB). In the last two years, scholarly authors and practitioners have been placing wide attention on organizational policy services to support employees’ WLB. Smart working is part of this last recent interest and refers to granting employees to manage their working hours and deciding when and how to work. To pursue our aim, we first mapped the presence of organizational and societal policies in the North of Italy. Then, we conducted a cross-sectional study on a sample of 206 employees on how employees perceive and evaluate such organizational policies. Our results show that the perception of the usefulness of a certain service such as smart working represents one of the most relevant applications of organizational policies. As such, smart working results are a feasible way the balance one’s work and personal life, even though there may be obstacles, such as company requests and lack of relationships with colleagues.