Renewal of the Supplementary Agreement

Way2Global has renewed its second-level supplementary agreement, introducing important new additions.

Anyone familiar with our translation agency knows that it has the special legal status of a Società Benefit. This means that we are actively committed to generating a positive social and environmental impact through our business.

Specifically, we intend to create value for the world, and our human capital plays a major role in this goal, enabling us to ensure timely, high-quality customer service.

Given their strategic importance, people and their happiness are naturally at the heart of our commitment to the common benefit, to the extent that we have enshrined this in our articles of association.

It is with this in mind that we have decided to renew the second-level supplementary agreement by including new benefit measures to adapt to the continuous and important social changes of our time.

Beyond smart working, toward the Anywhere Office

The most important new development is the introduction of an innovative way of organizing work that we have decided to call “Anywhere Office”.

Like many other companies, Way2Global has been operating with a 100% remote working arrangement since the start of the pandemic. Despite initial difficulties, our experience has shown that this method not only provides the company with greater efficiency and productivity, but also offers employees an opportunity to optimize their lifestyle and work-life balance.

For this reason, in light of this year’s exceptional economic results, but also and above all in consideration of our employees’ wishes, we decided to evolve what began as an emergency solution into a structural organizational model and what until now was simply remote work into a much more structured concept: the Anywhere Office.

Anywhere Office is simply a hybrid work arrangement, partly in-person and partly through remote work, a “dispersed office” concept, a “non-place” that gives employees total freedom to choose not only their working hours, but also their workplaces.

It is a model based on maximum hourly and organizational flexibility, providing independent and trust-based management of work time, fuelled by the new principles of empowering and involving employees in decision-making processes and in co-designing (design thinking), as well as inclusion, delegation and autonomy, and measuring performance solely on the basis of results – at the opposite end of the spectrum to the old top-down business models based on command and control.

Anywhere Office includes one or two days a week of in-person socializing and teamwork, which will remain optional for workers, who are free to opt for the alternative of connecting to meetings by video.

The remaining part of the week managed through remote work is complemented by a series of new measures aimed at guaranteeing employees the technical, economic, training and psychological support necessary to organize remote work in its noblest sense, i.e. the freedom to choose when and where to work.

Among other things, the agreement provides for a supply of equipment and furnishings for workers to set up their own home office, reimbursement for internet bills and, above all, a high-level training course on remote work and soft skills to consolidate workers’ skills so they can apply this organizational method in the most effective, empowering way.

The goal is to reduce stress and neutralize the harmful consequences of excessive remote work due to the 24-hour connection, favouring optimal working conditions, promoting personal responsibility and empowerment, creating trust, boosting resilience, optimizing wellbeing, pleasure and passion for work, regaining focus and balance in all areas of life, motivating people to engage and grow, and building relationships, collaboration and sharing.

Last but not least, we have provided workers with special remote psychological assistance and a mental coaching desk to manage any discomfort associated with distance and reduced socialising.

However, the Anywhere Office is not the only new addition to the agreement.

We are raising the bar for employee wellbeing

We are never satisfied at Way2Global, so if we have an opportunity to go beyond our legal obligations, we are always glad to do so.

In the new supplementary agreement, for example, we have introduced three new provisions in this regard.

The first is a “friendly time bank” that permits the transfer of leave and vacation time between colleagues. The company adopted this measure to meet people’s varied leave and vacation requirements. While some employees may need to care for a dependent family member in certain situations, others may not have this need or may even accrue unused vacation days. We therefore wanted to offer them an opportunity to mutually support each other, fostering friendships and unity among staff.

The second change relates to equal parental leave for new fathers in the workforce, offering a period that has been extended to the 5 months normally only granted for compulsory maternity leave. Our intention with this innovative measure is to go well beyond legal obligations and anticipate, we hope, national legislation geared towards greater gender equality, which relieves mothers from being exclusively responsible for parental care and allows fathers to fully experience fatherhood. The new measure supplements all existing measures at Way2Global to help new mothers in the workforce, ensuring their seamless, gradual return to work and actively promoting equal opportunity within the company.

The third new measure concerns extra leave for caregivers, which allows employees to take advantage of additional hours in the event that they need to care for children, elderly parents or other family members.

All the new measures outlined above contribute to systematically redesigning and enhancing the innovative employee wellbeing model set out in our second-level supplementary agreement, which has also been recognized for the second year by the prestigious Welfare Index PMI.

The pursuit of employee happiness is one of the shared benefit goals incorporated in our translation agency’s mission statement. Achieving this goal is by no means easy, especially in the current radically changing economic and social climate.

However, as a benefit corporation at the forefront of social innovation, we are determined to reaffirm our role as agents of change. We love experimenting and stepping out of our comfort zone every day to pursue new, more sustainable models, never afraid to make mistakes or face up to our limitations. Indeed, it is precisely these limitations that allow us to develop a new awareness that we can use to pioneer and inspire a paradigm shift toward sustainable development.