Smart working has not taken off: only 14.9% of employed people work remotely

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Remote working has not taken off: in Italy only 14.9% of employed people work remotely, with a potential of around 40%. The smart working trend received a big boost in 2020, when the share of teleworkers went from 4.8% to 13.7% compared to 2019, but remains a minority. The data emerges from the analysis of the Inapp. For the president Sebastiano Fadda it is “an opportunity not fully exploited, at least for the moment. Carrying out a theoretically teleworkable profession is often a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for having the opportunity to experience remote work. The data does not show the change of working paradigm that the pandemic seemed to have triggered, at least in our country. It is as if during the pandemic we had lived in a large bubble and the return to normality was nullifying the potential of remote working, due to a reduced ability to introduce radical innovations in the organization of work which envisages a combination of work phases from remotely with face-to-face work phases”.

The potential pool of smart working mainly concerns graduates, employees of large companies, those employed in services and civil servants. Slightly above-average incidences are found among women, residents of the North-West and Center and people with a diploma. According to companies with up to 5 employees, 84% of workers perform tasks that cannot be performed remotely. In 2019, only 14.6% of employed people in Europe usually worked from home. With the spread of Covid, a growth trend was recorded in the following two years. Italy, which in 2019 had percentages below the European average, doubled these values ​​with the pandemic, but a slowdown emerged in 2021. There is a gender difference in the perception of advantages and disadvantages of teleworking, with men appreciating greater autonomy, and women showing concern for career prospects, union rights and protections. The experience lived by millions of workers will continue probably to be part of the world of work, even if with different diffusion and intensity. At the micro level, the possible repercussions in the future concern the lives of individuals who have improved the levels of work-life balance. At the same time, however, smart working can expose you to the risk of isolation and the reduction of working and social relationships. At an intermediate level, smart working can positively influence work organization and productivity.

Companies have begun to rethink work processes and, in some cases, have changed work environments by investing in advanced digital technologies. It would be important to implement measures to support less agile companies by providing, for example, in addition to tax breaks and grants, specific networking, consultancy, training, knowledge management and technical assistance programmes. At a macro level, smart working can have important repercussions: greater diffusion of digitization in public services, lower environmental impact, redevelopment of peripheral areas, development of coworking spaces, repopulation of internal areas. The hope, notes the Inapp, is that it will be possible to exploit what has been experienced and learned, providing new strategies and tools to govern and overcome potential critical issues.