Before the pandemic, 2,458,210 employees (equal to 11%) worked remotely. In 2021, agile workers rose to 7,262,999 (and the share of total employees jumped to 32.5%). 46% of workers would like to continue doing their business in an agile way at least one day and almost 1 in 4 three or more days a week. This is what emerges from the policy brief “Remote work: implementation methods, tools and the workers’ point of view”, created by the National Institute for Public Policy Analysis (INAPP) through the Plus survey with a sample of over 45 thousand interviews (from 18 to 74 years old) in the period March-July 2021.
In most cases, neither individual nor collective agreements
Looking at the distribution of days worked remotely in 2021, it is observed that almost 50% were engaged in agile mode from 3 to 5 days a week and only 11.6% for a single day. Much of the remote work was carried out on a trust basis: only 16.5% was the result of a collective agreement and 14.3% of an individual agreement; for almost 37% of remote workers, however, there was no formalization.
The critical issues: disconnection and cost of domestic users
«Smart working, that is, that profound restructuring of production processes fueled by new IT and digital technologies, contemplates quotas of work carried out outside the physical spaces of the company – says Sebastiano Fadda, president of Inapp -. We do not know what the attitude of workers towards all the many aspects that make up the “smart working” mode is, but we do know from this survey what the attitude of workers towards “remote” work is as it has been configured below the lash of the pandemic. Overall, the evaluation of workers is positive, even if some criticalities arise in relation to some aspects, such as the problem of disconnection and the costs of domestic users. From this it can be deduced that there is a basis for moving from simple emergency remote work to new models of work organization associated with innovative re-engineering of production processes, but that efforts must be made to resolve critical issues “.
In the private sector, we begin to invest in future prospects
Many organizational methods have been introduced to facilitate and support remote work. Both in the public (71.5%) and in the private sector (64.4%) above all digital platforms have been activated for holding remote meetings; 62.1% of private companies and 41.9% of the PA provided workers with IT devices. The activation of cyber security protocols affected over 56% of employers. Furthermore, various actions have been implemented in the private sector aimed not only at allowing agile work to be carried out immediately, but also at harmonizing current conditions with future prospects, investing in training (46.8%), providing ergonomic equipment (25.7%) and paying a contribution (22.2%) to employees.
The any time connection
Regarding the issue of connection risk, the private sector appears to be more virtuous, with 65% of workers in the sector declaring that they can independently choose when to disconnect compared to 50.1% of those in the public. As regards the any-time connection, on the other hand, compared to an overall figure of 32.8%, in the public sector the share drops to 26.9%, while in the private sector it rises to 34.5%. With regard to the possibility of taking short breaks, a particularly high share (78.2%) does not show any critical issues, but over 49% say they can disconnect only for the lunch break. with often inadequate technological infrastructure, it was a positive experience.