Sudden stop for the smart working in Italy. In Italy, only 14,9% of employed people carry out part of their activity remotely, despite the boom that occurred in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, when it went from 4,8% in the previous year to 13,7% . But there is still a lot of potential and the ratio could rise to 4 out of 10.
This is what emerges from the latest analyses Inapp presented during the study day "Agility work, definitions and measurement experiences" which was held in Rome at the Inapp auditorium.
Report numbers
In the private sector non-agricultural, in companies with up to 5 employees, 84% of workers carry out tasks that cannot be performed remotely, but as the size of the company increases, this share decreases (56,4% among medium-sized ones, 50-249 employees and 34,2% among companies with over 250 employees). In 2021, only 13,3% of the companies interviewed used this method.
According to the analyses, it is above all graduates, employees of large companies, those employed in services and civil servants who carry out remote work. Slightly higher than average incidences of teleworkable professions are found among women, residents of the North-West and Center and people with a diploma.
The perception of some benefits e disadvantages of smart working also brings out a gender difference with the men, who particularly appreciate the greater autonomy, and the women, who instead show greater concern regarding career prospects (50,9%), trade union rights and protections (52,8%) and greater control by the employer (53,3%).
Smart working, Italy slows down: it is last in Europe
In 2019, only 14,6% of employed people in Europe usually worked from home and the scenario was quite heterogeneous, with Netherlands in which this mode reached 37,2%. With the spread of Covid, some countries that already showed values above the EU average in 2019 embarked on a growth trend in the following two years (Ireland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, France, Estonia, Malta e Portugal). Italy, which in 2019 had percentages below the European average, doubled these values with the health emergency, but in 2021 the growth rate of the use of smart working slowed down significantly (4,8% in 2019, 13,7 .2020% in 14,9, 2021% in 1,7 according to EU-LFS data, with even lower values among employees: from 2019% in 12,1 to 2020 in 13,8 and 2021 in XNUMX) .
Fadda (Inapp): "An opportunity not fully exploited"
An opportunity that has not been fully exploited, at least for now, and the solution of hybrid work is still poorly understood. This is what was said by the president of the Inapp, prof. Sebastian Fadda. “Carrying out a theoretically teleworkable profession is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for having the opportunity to experience remote work. The data tells us that the share of remote work varies from 25% for intellectual or executive professions to 2% for unskilled ones. Behind this distribution there is certainly the different degree of feasibility of remote work in the various professions, but also the different managerial ability to adopt new models of work organization by making use of new digital technologies".
"The data, therefore, does not reveal the shift in working paradigm that the pandemic seemed to have triggered, at least in our country - continued Fadda - it is as if during the pandemic we had lived in 'a large bubble' and the return to normality was thwarting the potential of remote work, due to a reduced ability to introduce radical innovations in the organization of work which provides for a combination of remote work phases with face-to-face work phases".
