Open Fiber accelerates on smart working and welfare

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Every day Open Fiber employs around 9,000 people between direct employees, over 1,700, and related industries. Their average age is 38, 33% are women and, says Ivan Rebernik, director of personnel, organization and services, “we have a great wealth of diversity and reference nationalities: there are 16 different passports in the company”.

The company, which was born to build a fiber optic ultra-broadband network infrastructure throughout the country, has already reached 16 million real estate units, houses, offices, headquarters of the Public Administration, and has an industrial plan of 15 billion euro, over one billion investments per year. If externally it acts as a ram’s head “to create the conditions to favor the connectivity of villages and towns, even mountainous and less populous ones”, says Rebernik, internally it tries to exploit the network and technologies to favor an approach very flexible at work, with a project that later became structural thanks to a union agreement, which he called Fiber working and which will start on July 1st.

The whole process took place «also from a perspective of sustainability, working on the social and environmental dimension – continues Rebernik -. Ours is a company characterized by a very high level of education, with a strong STEM vocation: 2 out of 3 of our people have a university degree and 3 out of 4 of these are engineers. The effort we make every day is to make this organization particularly agile and smart, because the work we do is demanding, it drains resources and a lot of intellectual capital».

The new agreement provides that «on a monthly basis, employees can work remotely for over 50% of working days. However, the counter is bimonthly and this allows you to take advantage of 21 days every two months, with a maximum of 12 days per month. It is an agreement that offers flexibility to everyone, but trying to differentiate, based on the needs of the workers and the company”. For some specific categories, such as new hires, “we have decided to reduce remote days to encourage their presence in the office in the first few months,” says Rebernik. On the contrary, “we have instead shared a regime of hyperflexibility for those who live in a situation of discomfort for the health of a child, a parent or their own: in these cases, remote working can even reach 100%”, he adds.

For new parents, however, “Fiber working becomes a support tool, with the addition of 45 days for pregnant women and a further 45 days after the birth of the child, for both parents – explains Rebernik -. As part of a constructive dialogue with the trade union organizations, we have also renewed the second level agreement, introducing measures to support parenthood, including an increase in the parental leave allowance». There are also paid leaves for the illness of children and additional days of paternity leave, with respect to those provided for by law.