Anywhere Office

Anywhere Office is the ultimate expression of Way2Global’s work culture and its core principles: flexibility, work-life balance, support for parenthood, corporate benefits, diversity and inclusion.

Before creating Way2Global, our Founder&CEO Laura Gori led a company that was at the forefront of corporate social responsibility to the extent that it pioneered what was then referred to as teleworking well ahead of other companies in Italy.

For us at Way2Global, this approach to business, oriented around people’s well-being, is both programmatic and vocational. This is why our translation agency was established as a Benefit Corporation — committed by its articles of association to the pursuit of people’s happiness — and immediately applied for B Corp Certification.

Flexibility, well-being and collective prosperity

The evolution towards our current operating model was triggered by the COVID pandemic, which made it urgently necessary to fully digitize our operations and experiment with new ways of organizing work.

Like other companies, we have adopted fully remote work to protect employees’ health and safety, revolutionizing the way we manage, communicate and promote our language services. Although implementing a change of this magnitude was no easy task, over time we have seen that the benefits clearly outweigh the areas for improvement.

In addition to the greater occupational health and safety guarantees associated with reduced mobility and therefore less exposure to potential risks of road accidents or illness, remote work allows us to improve work-life balance and to create new ways of organizing work in geographic terms. The ability to flexibly choose the places and times of work certainly has appreciable positive effects on everyone’s well-being and quality of life.

Moreover, the personal benefits have positive repercussions for the company as a whole: On the one hand, we are experiencing increased productivity thanks to better work management and time optimization; on the other hand, we can make processes and logistics more efficient, while at the same time strengthening reputational return and employer branding, which attracts new talent from all over Italy and builds employee loyalty.

The reopening of the world and the gradual return to face-to-face relationships in the post-pandemic period prompted us to reflect on how best to structure our office in the new normal: to return to in-person work or to retain the option of fully remote work? The solution, as is often the case, lies somewhere in the middle; indeed, today’s Anywhere Office was conceived as a way of combining both approaches.

Anywhere Office: a new work structure

Anywhere Office was created to preserve the advantages of remote work without overlooking the importance of socializing and relationships.

On an experimental basis and as a result of a collective participatory governance decision, we decided to develop a new cutting-edge paradigm: to maintain the remote work option, while enriching it with the option to meet and work in a network of meeting, co-working and other social venues, and in addition to relocate the company headquarters to the historic centre of Milan in a location adjacent to a major railway hub to facilitate logistics.

Creating our “distributed office” was a complex challenge that started with providing PCs, workstations, monitors and electronic devices to employees, as well as chairs, worktops and furniture, enabling everyone to set up their own home office based on ergonomic and functional criteria.

To help people implement remote work in the best sense of the term, i.e. by guaranteeing freedom of time and work location, and to avoid pitfalls stemming from abuse of remote work and 24-hour connectivity, we have supported this change with a  high-level training course known as SmartNetwork, which we have developed in partnership with Manpower and the start-up Benefit HUKY.

Our Anywhere Office arose through dialogue with people, a desire to co-design strategic development choices with employees, and a conviction that growth can only achieved by prioritizing workers. After all, at Way2Global we have always promoted work flexibility, staff empowerment and levelling of organizational structures rather than a traditional top-down approach.

We like to give the professionals on our team the freedom to manage themselves autonomously, working together flexibly to achieve goals and projects in groups that are not fixed but dynamic and constantly re-structuring.

Anywhere Office is a fluid new work approach that protects employee well-being, supports disadvantaged areas (work from Southern Italy), innovates the experience of working, reduces organizations’ environmental impact, and produces value for all stakeholders.

The Way2Global paradigm shows that taking care of people is always the first step in promoting sustainable business.