After the increase in teleworking due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations have seen the potential of this way of working and wish to initiate or advance its implementation in a planned way. To this end, it may be useful to develop the capacity of their managers or professionals to be smart working agents, in order to promote the implementation of a form of flexible teleworking that makes good use of technological tools and that favours the best working conditions. After defining smart working, this article presents a competency framework for the role of a smart working agent focused on three key competencies: understanding the context, facilitating implementation, and leading in a digital environment.

The purpose of this article is to provide some basic information on telework and to develop, in parallel, some reflections on this economic reality and the role of its legal regulation.

For some years, we have been observing a process of transformation of the nuclear bases on which we have built our labour relations. It is the result of digitalization, which challenges the logic of physical concentration and detaches activity from a single, static location. In other words, telework comes as standard with digitalization. However, it is only when its advancement became so abrupt and far-reaching that we noticed the shift and can already sense a break from the traditional work model.

This article explores the evolutionary progress of telework, beginning with two circumstances that were its main driving factors – digitalization and the COVID-19 pandemic –; observing it from a double dimension, namely organizational and regulatory, and summarizing the main changes in the narrative on telework, in order to contribute to the reflection on the work of the future society.

The occupational health paradigm implemented with the Law on Prevention of Occupational Risks in 1995 is promoting new models of preventive management, still incipient, in favor of the so-called healthy organizations. As a result of this change, there has been a move from the traditional concept of safety and health, essentially linked with occupational accidents and diseases, towards a more far-reaching concept, safety and health, including workers' health in its whole extent, whether physical, psychological and social.

After twenty years of the enforcement of the rule, there are many achievements and progress has been made in prevention, but many challenges will arise in the coming years. Among others, those related to the breakdown of space and time barriers in the labor activity as a result of the incorporation of ICT. In this regard, the article deals with the problem that arises in the enforcement of occupational health and safety in telework.

The present analysis focuses on the problem from the very basis of the practical application of the requirement of occupational safety and health in telework, the occupational risk assessment, which is the foundation on which all our regulatory structure on prevention of occupational hazards is built and connected.