Cida: “It is possible to exploit the potential of smart working”

The experience of smart working must be channeled in the context of the types of employment contracts and managed with managerial criteria to exploit its potential and innovative power, otherwise it risks ending up in the memory book of the pandemic emergency. To take stock of the re-motion work after the boom in its use caused by Covid 19 and to try to frame it correctly, is the latest issue of ‘Labor Issues’, the quarterly observatory on work that Cida, the confederation of executives public and private and high-level professionals, it creates in collaboration with the Adapt study center. The first obstacle, explains Cida, concerns the heterogeneity of definitions and data. Remote work is labeled with different names: smart working, agile work, remote work, home work, teleworking. Each definition leads to a different representation of the phenomenon; for example, smart working implies a managerial approach and management, while agile work is the normative declination, to fix its characteristics and rules. For this reason, different sources have been used in the Cida-Adapt Observatory: Istat, Eurostat, Eurofound, a survey conducted by ManagerItalia and estimates by the Observatory on smart working of the Politecnico di Milano. The quantitative aspect is also affected by this heterogeneity. For Eurostat, the percentage of employees who worked from home in 2020, compared to 2019, grew by 8.9 percentage points to almost 14%. From the data of the Politecnico Observatory, on the other hand, it clearly emerges that the pandemic represents the element of discrimination on the different percentage incidence of smart workers on potential workers in Italy. In fact, it went from 15% in 2019 to 43.90% in March 2020. From March 2020 to September 2020 there was a decrease of 10.1 percentage points. The incidence, on the other hand, returns to rise after September 2020 to 35.70%. According to the Manageritalia survey, 89.8% of workers who will carry out their work remotely between September and December, even for a few days a week, will be 89.8%, with 31.80% of workers who will perform the service at distance for 90-100% of the time. The set of data provided therefore allows, in part, to frame the phenomenon in its complexity and in its organizational and social consequences. In fact, the possible consequences in terms of psycho-social risks from isolation or the negative consequences linked to the dimensions of relationality and sociality that have profound organizational implications cannot be ignored, together with the enormous potential that is rightly often spoken of. Dimensions that also affect the role of managerial and managerial profiles who more than others have on the one hand the possibility, often, to carry out their work remotely but, on the other, see all the organizational risks of the remote management of business dynamics built on a strong value of physical presence. “The need to react to contact and mobility restrictions has generated new solutions, applied quickly, thanks above all to the clarity and commitment of many managers” commented Mario Mantovani, president of Cida. “But now the historical difficulty, especially in Italy, of thinking in organizational terms, of applying articulated principles such as objectives, results, processes, collaboration, reporting to work is re-emerging. The old reassuring habits of considering work as a sum of hours, of navigating on sight, of reacting to events without planning, take over. Public Administrations, with the application of general quantitative limits, miss the opportunity to accelerate a process of reorganization and digitization that is always postponed, against the background of new and exhausting contractual negotiations. But even private work, except in more structured companies, returns to old habits and the misleading theme of the ‘privilege’, to be granted or not, to work in smart working. It is a question of developing organizations consistently, taking advantage of a new opportunity, cleared in common use and no longer relegated to marginal cases, to improve work ”, commented Mantovani. Speaking of the labor market, the Cida-Adapt report also shows conflicting signs of the quantitative trend in the first eight months of the year. Employment rebounds – only that of employees – due to the reopening, but it seems to decline again in August. The shortage of seasonal workers, reported in many sectors, shows its effects especially in services. Workers are growing in the construction sector, which is growing rapidly and at risk of overheating. Unemployment decreases, but inactive people start to rise again. All this without the removal of the redundancy block showing significant effects. “Numbers are fundamental to understanding the structure of work, but can we see if and how quality increases? Good, well-paid work integrated with modern welfare is what we need. And this work is still too little ”, Mantovani concluded.