The pandemic has not been the driving force behind smart working as prophesied. Only one employee out of six works remotely, when according to estimates for 2023 by the National Institute for the Analysis of Public Policies (INAPP) on the composition of the national workforce, 2.5 employees out of six could use it, i.e. four people out of ten. In fact, the data does not show that change of working paradigm in our country. As if during the pandemic we had lived in ‘a big bubble’ and the return to normality was nullifying the potential of remote working, due to a reduced ability to introduce radical innovations in the organization of work which involves a combination of work phases remotely with face-to-face work phases. The health emergency had indeed doubled the number of people who worked in “smart”, but already in 2021 the growth rate of the use of smart working has slowed down significantly. In 2020, at least partially 12.1% of employees worked from home, in 2021 13.8% (14.9% of workers as a whole). It must be said that before the pandemic Italy had percentages of employed people who accessed smart working well below the European average.
First the definition. Remote work, telework, agile work, smart working, home working: they are not all synonyms. This survey addressed the issue of teleworking, i.e. the possibility of working with more or less the same methods and times, in a place that is not the traditionally designated one, such as the company or institution in which one is employed, but at home or in a public place such as a co-working.
Data from the Fifth INAPP Survey, which involved 15,000 employees in 2021 and 5,000 employers, tell us that the share of smart-workers varies from 25% for intellectual or executive professions to 2% for unskilled ones.
Among employees, it went from a spread of “smart-working” at home throughout the working week of 0.6% in the pre-COVID era to 3.9% in 2021, to which is added a 4.4 % of employed people who work equally from home or in the company and another 8.6% who choose a public place such as a co-working. Overall, 81% of permanent employees do not have smart working, against 89% in the pre-COVID period. The same for 66% of temporary employees, 74% of collaborators, and 77% of self-employed workers.
But who can realistically work in smart working? Out of all businesses, 80% of workers carry out tasks that cannot be performed remotely, but by observing the size of the office, the scenario changes. The share of workers who carry out non-teleworkable activities decreases as size increases: it is 84.4% for companies with up to 5 employees; 79.9% in those with up to 9 employees; 68.6% in realities with 10-49 employees; 56.4% in those with 50-249 employees; and only 34.2% in large companies with more than 250 workers.