Zoom, the smart working company that has enabled millions of workers around the world to work from home during the pandemic, has asked its employees to return to the office. The symbolic importance of the news is obvious and, in fact, deep of remote work have been published everywhere. A bit as if the Californian company’s request to return to the office at least twice a week to all those who work within an 80 kilometer radius of the workplace somehow sanctioned the end of remote work. An excessively catastrophic forecast, just like the scenarios, formulated immediately after the pandemic, hypothesizing a complete disappearance of offices and all the satellite activities linked to them, were excessively optimistic. Smart working is not destined to disappear permanently, but it is certain that, apart from the logic of urgency, it poses certain problems that need to be understood and, if possible, resolved.
In this sense, the results of a survey carried out in 34 countries on different continents by a group of economists from Stanford University are very revealing. The study (Working From Home Around The Globe 2023) attempted to measure the state of the art in smart working between April and May 2023: it turned out that, on average, full-time employees worked at home 0.9 days per week, with significant differences. , not so much in terms of the types of work as in terms of the geographical area to which the employees belong. The average is in fact 1.4 days in English-speaking countries, compared to only 0.7 days in Asia and 0.8 in Europe. Australia leads the championship with 1.7 days, followed by the United Kingdom (1.5) and the United States (1.4), with Greece and South Korea representing the countries where work of office is practically dominant (0.5). In Italy we have 0.7 days per week. The researchers compared what workers wanted (on average 2 days of working from home) with what companies were willing to offer (1.1 days). In total, 66.5% returned to office work on a stable basis, 25% obtained a hybrid solution and only 7.9% maintained smart work full-time.
The same Stanford researchers did not provide a single explanation for these geographic differences. Certainly, English-speaking countries have seen greater efforts by unions to maintain this advantage: in Canada, federal workers went on strike for two weeks to keep working smart, but only managed to get a general commitment to evaluate the issue. One interpretation of the phenomenon is particularly stimulating and can be confirmed by the Italian situation: American management models have been based for many years on performance measurement, which has allowed companies to be much more “relaxed” when it comes to monitoring productivity, even remotely. In countries, like Italy, where these models have had difficulty establishing themselves, due to the language barrier, the fear of not being able to control the employee has produced the “return to the office effect”. In fact, Italian managerial and entrepreneurial culture is still far from implementing data-driven measurement models. Most often, instead of applying algorithms, they outsource the task to consultants whose reports tend to confirm their clients’ beliefs and biases rather than effectively quantify productivity.
The particular composition of Italian entrepreneurship, made up mainly of small and medium-sized businesses, obviously complicates the situation. The fact remains that the correct use of data is now essential and that continuing to avoid doing so will put many companies at risk of being excluded from the market and, above all, from the battle for talent. Not only measuring performance impartially, using algorithms, but also assessing which roles and people are most effective in different ways of working (hybrid, remote, in-person) would enable greater organizational agility and better deals. performance. This requires great ductility and the ability to deal with complexity and fragmentation of organizational populations never before seen. Perhaps this is the real challenge: abandoning the old for the new without knowing which organizational model works. A great opportunity for those concerned with human resources and transformation. Hopefully these professional families can find the vision and courage to step up their game and really try.
