Pa, goodbye to smart working: civil servants in the office

Civil servants return to the office. The public administration is preparing to say goodbye to smart working after a year and a half of applying the emergency legislation established by the Conte 2 government to counter the spread of Covid-19 infections.

PA: GOODBYE TO SMART WORKING

With the new rules, that could come with a corrective to the Green Pass decree currently being studied by government technicians, remote work will become the exception, while the majority of workers will return to their desks, working in presence. In parallel the green pass obligation, currently valid for health personnel and for i school and university teachers, will also be extended to the workers of the Pa. As revealed by The Sun 24 hours, the space and agile working methods will be established by the managers based on the organizational needs of the individual offices. 

The new rules should take effect from early October, but first it will be necessary to find an agreement with the unions, opposed to the extensive use of green certification and for this reason criticized by the president of Confindustria, Carlo Bonomi, who defined the position of some trade union associations as "an escape from responsibility". 

Returning to civil servants, the amendment to the green pass decree would meet the requests of the Minister for Public Administration, Renato Brunetta, who on more than one occasion had spoken of the need to bring civil servants back to the office. Just yesterday, Tuesday 31 August, commenting on the strong increase in Italian GDP recorded in the second quarter, the minister stated that, commenting "growth could be even higher if it recovers the ordinary way of working in presence, both publicly and privately".

We recall that last April, with the extension decree, the Draghi Government canceled the minimum percentages of smart working in order to get many PA workers back to the office. The monitoring carried out over the past few months have however indicated that the elimination of the minimum limit did not change the organization of the Public Administrator, whose employees continued to work remotely in most cases.  

FROM GOOGLE TO ZOOM

The theme of the return of workers to the office is at the center of the international debate. In fact, there are many companies, large and small, public and private, who are trying to find a point of balance between smart working and face-to-face work. Suffice it to say that a few hours ago the managing director of Google, Sundar Pichai has communicated to its employees that the return to face-to-face work will be postponed from October 2021 to January 2022, due to the spread of the Delta variant. The CEO explained that after January 10, the offices in the different countries will determine when to bring the workers back based on different needs. Other companies, on the contrary, have already recalled their workers to the office, a choice that is also having strong repercussions on the Stock Exchange. In the session of August 31, the title Zoom, the now famous video conferencing app, fell by 16,69% after a positive quarterly in terms of profits and revenues which however showed a slowdown in growth due precisely to the reopening of the offices which is driving workers away from constant meetings on Zoom to which they had become accustomed during the lockdowns, effectively reducing the demand for platform services. In 2020, Zoom shares had increased by more than 600%, while since the beginning of 2021 the increase is only 3%.