With the pandemic, we have discovered that the workplace does not necessarily coincide with the workplace: for many professions it is possible to work from home or wherever we want. The next step will also be to eliminate the concept of working time. To start measuring work – certain jobs – based on results and not on the fact that you have been at your desk for a certain number of hours every day. Let’s be clear: working hours were a fundamental trade union achievement without which people – above all, the workers – were forced to endless, inhuman shifts. But in a century the work has changed: there are far fewer workers and far more people working in the services. I am referring to all those who, when the pandemic broke out, were able to continue working in smart working: with a computer connected to the network. There was a lot of talk about smart working, about the fact that it wasn’t really smart because people were in fact nailed to home at the same working time but connected in endless video calls; and then of the need, expressed by some CEOs, even to Google and Apple, and also by our minister of public administration, to return to the workplace. In reality, what we have learned in recent months leads in the opposite direction: “For many professions, time is simply irrelevant,” Tammy Erickson told The Hustle. What matters is the result. If the service or product is well done.
The point is not to reduce working hours or to have a week of four working days as well as to start experimenting in different countries: the point is to abolish working hours. This thing – called ROWE, Results Only Work Environment – was tested well before the pandemic in a large American commercial chain: as a result, productivity increased by 40 percent and workers sleep better, get less sick and have less. family conflicts (complete study here). From the technological point of view it can already be done, from the cultural point of view instead a gigantic step forward is needed: scrapping the rigid formal control of employees to give them autonomy and responsibility. It is not an easy leap, whoever does it first has won. Thing? The best talents around.
The employer will soon be measured by this factor as well.
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