Covid-19 will force us home for another few weeks, perhaps months, and companies (including the Public Administration) have seen fit to resort to so-called smart working, or smart working or teleworking, if you prefer. By now more or less everyone has organized themselves, by force of circumstances: even the school, which risks being closed until the end of the school year, has given itself to smart learning. But what impact are these innovative (and now mandatory) formulas having on workers and businesses? To draw a picture is a study conducted by the Observatory 4.Manager, which immediately detected the surge in smart working, which in a very short time went from a niche phenomenon to a mass phenomenon.
The advantages of smart working, in addition to the fact that it is necessary today, are many and the Observatory reminds them:
- Attraction of talent (according to the Smart Working Observatory of the Milan Polytechnic 76% of "agile" workers are satisfied of their work compared to 55% of those who work in traditional mode)
- Reduction of fixed costs, in particular related to the size and cost of the offices
- Traffic reduction, with benefits on the productivity of the logistics chains
- Reduction of air pollution.
There is one fact in particular that gives an idea: 1 million more workers in smart working mode, even only 50% of the time (an entirely achievable goal, even only in the private sector), would make it possible to reduce CO2 emissions in the atmosphere in the order of several hundred thousand tons per year.
However, the new scenario, when the situation has returned to normal, it will impose a paradigm shift, particularly in management: managers prepared to manage the new ways of working will be needed. “When the health emergency is over, we could be faced with a completely new scenario – he declares Fulvio D'Alvia, General Manager of 4.Manager – both by virtue of the experience started in the weeks of the Covid-19 containment by tens of thousands of companies and millions of workers and, above all, from a cultural point of view".
“Let's think of SMEs and related supply chains – continues D'Alvia – where a greater managerial culture is needed. The management of supply and demand for Smart Working will become an increasingly important growth factor for SMEs for productivity and competitiveness. Prepared managers will be needed, both in terms of professional and digital skills, just think of the issue of cyber security linked to remote working, and in terms of the soft skills necessary for managing relationships and organizational changes. To make Smart Working structural, you must first put people at the center and then think about technologies".
“The importance of the managerial factor – concludes D'Alvia – is demonstrated by the current emergency: companies that have equipped themselves with an innovation manager are reacting much more effectively in terms of reorganization of production processes Compared to others".
In fact, for Italy this sudden revolution is a great novelty: although smart working has been growing for some time in our country too, especially in the PA, a Eurostat survey in 2018 showed Italy in the penultimate place among the top 10 countries by GDP, ahead of only Türkiye, considered a European country in the specific ranking. At the top was Sweden, where almost one worker out of 3 works "occasionally" in "working from home" mode: 6% do it regularly, while in Holland the "usually workers from home" are almost 15%. In Italy, only 3,7% always work from home. Today there will be many, many more. But the entire organization needs to be rethought.
