ESCAPE is a research project aiming at studying how employee engagement in companies is affected by different factors, especially in the context of smart working.
Following Covid-19 pandemic and the mass diffusion of ever more effective communication media, smart working has indeed experienced an unprecedented growth in the last years. This new managerial philosophy is based on flexibility and autonomy for employees in choosing their work spaces, their working times and the tools to use, but also on more responsibility for the outcome. Therefore, while this innovation represents an opportunity for organizations and employees, it poses new and complex challenges from the human resources point of view. In particular, it increased the priority for firms to count on employees who are not only loyal and flexible, but also, and especially, engaged. Starting from these assumptions, this work firstly takes a detailed picture of the smart working startup panorama in order to detect trends and future perspectives in this field. Secondly, we present and validate on industry data a theoretical framework for fostering the employee engagement in companies through transformational leadership.
The outputs of these activities allowed the Team to build a global and easy to access startup dataset, whose validity has already been tested and proved by academic research. On the other hand, an unprecedented model in the literature has been validated, contributing to move a further step in making work from home ever smarter.
Principal Academic Tutor:
Mariano Corso (Politecnico di Milano)
Academic Tutor
Luca Gastaldi (Politecnico di Milano)
External Tutor:
Fiorella Crespi – Osservatori Digital Innovation
Gabriele Boccoli – Osservatori Digital Innovation
Rita Zampieri – Osservatori Digital Innovation