Lo smart working after the pandemic is destined to stay: for 90% of companies, reveals the latest survey by Aidp – the Italian association for personnel management – it is a final mode, and nearly 58% of new hires and employees ask for the option to work remotely as a precondition for accepting or continuing the assignment. After the emergency, however, there is a need to define a stable regulatory frameworkwhich also takes into account unresolved issues.
“The point today is no longer to answer the question of whether or not smart working is necessary but to understand, and in some way prefigure, an authentic smart working model and define a new balance between the different ways of working ”, he explains Matilde Marandola, national president of Aidp.
Smart working resists the pandemic: workers like it and it’s more sustainable
by Roberto Zarriello
The rules on smart working introduced following the pandemic emergency have in fact been extended until the end of June. But what happens next? According to Aidp, the perspective for most realities is theintroduction of the hybrid mode between face-to-face and remote work: 38% of companies, in fact, stated that employees will be able to work remotely at least 2 days a week and 14% at least 1 day a week. In the other cases, with lower percentages, it ranges from 3 to 5 days up to a presence of only one day per month. According to Marandola “it is not just a question of working methods or rules, but it is also, perhaps above all, a cultural theme. The redefinition of the traditional space-time boundaries of the organization of work presupposes a adaptation of traditional concepts of work, such as the issue of workers’ autonomy and responsibility in the face of less control. And the data of our research in this sense is comforting, where it is clear that 75% of companies will not set up remote control systems”.
Companies, Aidp underlines, are changing organization and physiognomy to adapt to the new hybrid way of working. 30% already have refurbished the physical spaces to organize the work remotely and 27% are doing it. At the same time, 50% of the sample has already defined i minimum suitability requirements of private premises as a remote workplace for the purposes of health and safety protection. Also on the right to disconnect the Aidp report reveals that 42% of companies stated that they have introduced guarantees from this point of view, while 36% are thinking about it. Furthermore, 46% intend to adopt specific suggestions and good practices for better management of remote work, such as for example codes of conduct for the timing and participation in video meetings or for the management of mail correspondence. From the point of view of remote labor regulation, only 19% of companies have set up collective agreements in this sense, while 62% declared that they have no agreements and another 19% have entered into negotiations with the trade unions.
We free the work (certain jobs) from the timetable
by Riccardo Luna
Among the questions still open is that of injuries. How are those that happen while the worker is in smart working considered? “Until now, the protections connected to agile work almost always find their source in the individual agreement, which is still a contract stipulated between the worker and the employer”, observes Marandola. “Remote workers are insured against accidents by applying the general criteria valid for all other employees, with the only limit of the elective risk which is one of the causes of exclusion from the Inail accident protection of the worker”, she adds. By elective risk we mean a behavior contrary to common sense adopted by the worker, as a result of which the accident at work occurs. According to Inail, explains the president of Aidp, “accidents that occur while the worker carries out the activity outside the company premises and in the place chosen by the same are protected if caused by a risk connected with the work performance”: to understand if this is really the case, it is necessary to go back toindividual agreement between company and worker. If this agreement does not exist, as can happen in the case of recourse to “simplified” agile work, “Inail will carry out specific checks to establish whether the activity carried out by the employee at the time of the accident is in any case closely connected with that of work, even if carried out outside the company premises “.
This is how the office of the future is created
For remote work, the contribution of the technology, which “has become and must be even more a very powerful tool, capable of guaranteeing exceptional increases in the quality of performance”, observes Marandola. “Not all organizations, and therefore not all workers, were or are ready to these changes from a practical point of view. In many cases, for example one was registered lack of equipment such as PCs, printers, wifi network “. For Marandola, “the NRR, the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, allocates the figure of 49.86 billion for the first mission dedicated to Digitization, innovation, competitiveness and culture, and has as its objective the digital modernization of the country’s communication infrastructures. I believe these resources can be very useful in bridging the digital gap in which many organizations still live and also to contribute to reskilling of IT and / or digital skills that are and will be fundamental for the future “.
Smart working, technologies alone are not enough
by Marco Frojo
There are still several critical aspects of practical application of smart working: according to the dedicated Observatory of the Politecnico di Milano, in the period of complete remote control the 28% of workers suffered from technostress and 17% from over working, demonstrating the fact that we cannot talk about agile work without having defined an organizational model and adequate policies that make it feasible and positive for all interested parties. According to the study by Cefriel, the digital innovation center of the Polytechnic, some precautions are needed to better set the new course of smart working.
First it will be company spaces need to be rethought by providing places dedicated to interactions and places of isolation. It will then be necessary adjust the times of work, avoiding that smart working becomes remote work without time constraints: for example, avoiding meetings between 13 and 14.30 or the involvement of colleagues, barring unforeseen events, outside working hours and on weekends. Finally, enhance relationships in the workplace and above all rethink leadership models: smart working in fact needs generative, empathic leadership that is attentive to people’s development and well-being.
Not just technology and platforms: smart working needs empathy
by Andrea Frollà
Having established these general principles, in practice there are then a series of practical issues to be addressed, mainly related to technology. For Alfonso Fuggetta, CEO and scientific director of Cefriel, “It is often not considered that people do not have all the tools they need to work remotely. We tend to assume that everyone has a fast connection, but maybe not everyone knows how to use document sharing or videoconferencing systems correctly ”. For Fuggetta there are four areas in which to intervene for a correct management of smart working. “The first is that infrastructural: workers need stable connections, PCs and other devices suitable for working remotely. Secondly, those who work outside the office need to platforms, such as sharing documents. The third level is that of organizational processes, which should be digitized as much as possible. Finally, the fourth level is the culture: it is necessary to approach in order to know with certainty which are the activities that make sense to carry out at home and which are the best ways of collaborating. You can’t spend the day in a perennial videoconference ”. The four levels, Fuggetta emphasizes, “obviously take on different weights and importance depending on the type of company and work activity”. The challenge for the next few months, according to the Cefriel director, is to find a balance in the management of work, and to do so it will be necessary to “ensure that the digitization of processes and operating methods becomes a reality”.
Smart working, over 7 million remote workers in Italy
by Sibilla Di Palma
