We have already analysed the value of smart working in business terms or generally numerical terms. Let us now try to understand more specifically the role of remote work, observing it with three different but complementary magnifying glasses.
Fragile workers
The pandemic crisis, as is known, has led to the spread of the so-called agile work; a practice initially designed to cope with the emergency, but which, with the passage of time, has quickly consolidated even with the disappearance of the contagion. Reasons that, pending a unitary and structural regulation that updates the incomplete Law 22 May 2017, no. 81, have pushed politics to intervene with Emergency Decrees converted into Law (Relaunch Decree, Reopenings, Bis Aid) that could adequately support workers - or at least try to do so. Among the categories that the State has sought and is still trying to protect the most are that of fragile professionals and parents of under 14 in the private sector. For them, inserted in the Milleproroghe Decree 2023 converted into Law and published in the Official Gazette on February 27, 2023, the extension of smart working (to be considered a "normal", not extraordinary modality) has arrived until June 30, 2023. A decision that also provides, if remote work is not compatible with the activity carried out by the categories of workers affected by the extension, the possibility of ad hoc vocational training courses or a reassignment to different tasks, provided that they belong to the same area of classification and equally paid.
The measure, however limited and questionable - especially taking into account the differentiated management between the public and private sectors - demonstrates the increasingly important role that smart working has assumed in recent years. Not only in terms of economic advantages and time management, but also as a necessary support for those who, having to face a condition of disability or pathological conditions considered at risk, find in remote work even a partial relief of their daily life.
Commuters
Let's now try to widen our gaze. Because smart working, in addition to being particularly useful to vulnerable workers, represents a mode of employment that has brought many benefits to different strata of the population. Once again we leave out the mere - and already mentioned - economic aspect, to focus instead on the category of so-called "commuters".
The data collected by Istat in the period 2019-2021 are, in this sense, quite eloquent. In the period prior to the health emergency, there were about 33 million Italian commuters, with peaks of more than 40 commuters per 100 inhabitants in different regions of the North. With the progressive spread of the contagion, the situation has naturally changed and in the last three years the percentages of commuters have fallen sharply. Suffice it to say that in the months immediately prior to the pandemic, 81.6% of professionals and students planned to move about 5 times a week; a figure that has dropped to 68.1% since the crisis has scaled down. As well as it is striking that, in the last period, working and studying totally remotely was 10.3%, against 3.4% recorded in the first months of 2020.
These numbers, strongly conditioned by a systematic use of smart working, impose an important reflection on the future of remote work today, in a historical period in which the emergency seems to have returned. Well, the will of the commuters - or at least the wish - seems to go in only one direction. In fact, Ipsos data for 2021 reveal that 80% (between workers and students) are not willing to travel on public transport every day; both in the name of safer modes of travel and to avoid gatherings.
In addition, according to a study carried out at the Harvard Business School, the long journeys would bring considerable disadvantages not only to workers, but to the companies themselves. In fact, the research, dated 2015-2017, shows how much commuting risks being harmful to productivity and creativity: a survey of more than 3400 inventors at 1180 technology companies in California and New England reveals, with every increase of 10 kilometres in the home-work distance, a 5% decrease in registered patents, as well as a 7% decrease in quality. Results that, although detailed and should be analysed with due caution, constitute a further incentive for a "remote" future. A future in which a hybrid employment formula can represent a more than adequate solution to new needs and social transformations.
Redevelopment of the villages
Reflecting on smart working means, finally, also emphasising its environmental impact. And beyond the effects on emissions already explored elsewhere, it is also essential to highlight that remote work has had and continues to play a key role in the redevelopment of small Italian municipalities, which have been affected for decades by a progressive phenomenon of depopulation. Agile work has in fact transformed our daily professional life and has pushed most workers to reflect not so much on where they work, but on how; that is, to question the possibility of rethinking one's physical location during the period of employment.
On the other hand, there are many people who, following the pandemic, have decided to move, leave the cities and move to the sea or in the mountains, so that they can work surrounded by nature, without wasting time and energy in traffic, but experiencing a new lifestyle. Elements that, in addition to leading to a considerable decrease in workers' stress, can be decisive from a socio-cultural point of view.
The arrival of a certain number of new people in a small Italian municipality, in fact, does not exclusively contribute to the psycho-physical well-being of employees. It brings with it wealth, life, energy, work, and, with them, the possibility of relaunching the territory through a series of services (including school) that can encourage a conscious "use" of those places and favour their growth.
In conclusion...
In these short paragraphs we have therefore tried to show not so much the development of the Smart working mode in itself, but its importance in terms of supporting fragile and commuting workers. The data collected also highlighted how the aforementioned remote formula helps numerous villages in our country to regain part of their identity and to counter the depopulation that afflicts them, favouring instead a "return to nature" and its calm. Smart working and coworking are the solid foundations on which the idea and
the mission of NotOnlyDesk rest. The union of these two factors is the present and, above all, the future of the world of work. A world that, today more than ever, cannot afford to leave anyone behind, but on the contrary must make every effort to evaluate the improvements necessary to create an efficient networking in the name of innovation and the will to grow together.
