Inps, in Milan we talk about smart working: hybrid works, as long as workers are stimulated

Data belies the fact that those who work remotely produce less, but it is necessary not to isolate workers to generate an unpleasant adverse effect

MILAN – smart working and its future, its implementation, its constant balancing with a world that changes and that gives way, in the post-pandemic, to a new way of organization. These are the themes put forward in the event organized by INPS at the Milan headquarters in via Circo 16.

“The dramatic experience of the pandemic has produced an unprecedented disruption to the organization of work, favoring among other things a significant acceleration of remote working, smart working, which is growing rapidly in companies as well as in public administrations “. This was stated by the new INPS president Gabriele Fava, who opened the proceedings via video link. And in fact, more than one thing has changed: taking the INPS headquarters in Milan as an example, the director of INPS coordination for the metropolitan city of Milan says that productivity in the last two years, with 40% of smart working, is higher than that of 2019, when this form of work was equal to 0. “The representation with the year 2019 is interesting, which you see as a year in which smart working did not exist, it was essentially at a threshold of 0, and in which Milan reached a value of productivity equal to 135.55”, lower than the last two years. A smart working which, as Saviano explains, “can reach 16 working days per month”, and which is ad hoc with respect to the employee’s condition. For example, “the management lever that I intended to use together with the management of Milan aims to favor above all women, with geographical origins from the south”, in such a way as to increase “our ability to be attractive also for the new generations, for the new competitions compared to access to Northern realities”.

In short, the so-called ‘agile working’ can, indeed must be a tool with which the company can meet workers who require particular needs and who are vulnerable. We are thinking above all of employees who come from other regions, and especially of women, who in Milan represent 59% of the staff (687), compared to 41% of men (478). “We realize that life in Milan is a very expensive life, the cost of living is complicated, it is very high and smart working wants to be one of the tools, not the only one, intended to favor for some age groups naturally and some geographical origins”, Saviano points out, recognizing how this is “a tool that has been able to greatly promote well-being within the structure, in fact the recent well-being findings that we have hired in Milan, however, they highlight how the level of satisfaction of this institute among the staff is quite high”.

In short, smart working works, as long as it is organized in such a way as not to ‘force’ the worker away from the company for too long. In fact, as the human resources director of INPS Giuseppe Conte observes, “a trend that looks at smart working from the worker’s point of view, and that is the risk of alienation”, but above all there We need to understand how to organize ourselves in the future, when new technologies (including artificial intelligence) replace some more methodical jobs, which are the same ones to which remote work is most easily applied. “We – Conte points out – are moving towards a model that increasingly delegates automated and ordinary, repetitive work to machines, and instead wants people to develop their skills to design new services, to adapt them, to make themselves available to people, to relate to the customer. However, this requires moments of aggregation of people, of combination of skills, of human relationship also with the users and therefore from this point of view the medium-term study will also have to be carried out, because the topic needs to be addressed.”

It is therefore necessary to avoid trends that have already occurred in other countries, where employees have no longer returned to the company for months. Vodafone’s Human Resources director Silvia Cassano offers a vivid example of how smart working represents a real resource only if regulated: “My belief is that we must first try to make the system work well model as conceived, because otherwise if we fall into the dynamic of remoteization as has often happened in America, and we risk going towards an opposite trend”, for this reason “the models – he observes – must necessarily be adapted to the corporate culture and historical context “. After that, “covid has accelerated the practice of reviewing employee well-being as a strategic element of company performance, therefore today in Vodafone we adopt a Smart working model called fixed hybrid, therefore it is hybrid but is based on a minimum number of days in presence (8-10) in the office”.

The hybrid system is therefore the key to dealing with changes, it will be up to companies in consultation with workers to organize it in the best possible way. “It’s not true that with the hybrid system you work less, you work better, especially with the awareness that it is professionalism that makes you make that leap in quality”, he states. We become small entrepreneurs: it means that we have a great sense of belonging but at the same time we are professionals who also know how to work alone”, points out the director of General Affairs and Resources of Arera (Energy, Networks and Environment Authority) Claudio Ranucci .

“We have learned that in the very short term, with networking, with remote working, employee productivity increases, but probably the effect is that of novelty, and this should make us reflect, because people need news in work. In the medium term, your data shows that you have had a small amount of productivity which then stabilizes after a while”, observes Bocconi professor Giovanni Valotti. In short, “the person who has been doing the same job for 10 years does it with the left hand, but gets bored“, notes Valotti, who places the emphasis on balance. The hybrid form is good, but “the more you invest in relationships, the more you need to invest in society”, so on the other hand it is necessary to “create opportunities for physical meeting, recognition, events, conferences”, and “give people the opportunity to see each other with others people”, because “inevitably the distance over time can become repetitive and can lead to some form of emigration”.

In short, if one wanted to make a summary, it is clear that in the work of the future the human relationship takes on fundamental importance, and, as the director of the INPS Metropolitan Branch Alberto Dotto observes, it is always necessary to try to dialogue with employees, < strong>“because motivation is a fundamental element that must be built over time”, but above all because “that “people today ask for attention”, more attention than in the past. “Before, ours was a more hierarchical organization , more stable, everyone in the office, with the manager he could check on a daily basis what he asked for, but now – specify. the world has changed and we too, a couple of years ago “we tried to analyze what the new skills were necessary and therefore we identified the so-called soft skills, i.e. those linked to the ability to delegate, and more”.