480 thousands, mainly men between 38 and 58 years of age, living in the North-West part of the Country. These are the 2018 italian smart workers according to the Osservatorio Smart Working of the Politecnico di Milano’s School of Management (OSW). An year after the law about agile working, 56% of the large private business and 8% of the public administration have at least a smart working project.

“A revolution not to stop”, this is the title of the OSW’s research focused on the diffusion of smart working in Italy, on workers and managers’ perception, wellbeing and actions in private entrerprises and public administration. Here the most significat results.

Although the law on smart working wanted to foster organized projects in the public administration, nowadays only the 8% have started, comparing to the 56% of the large private business. The small and medium size business confirm the 2017’s situation (from 22% to 24%).

The governament law, instead, risulted in more difficulties for private companies to manage and start agile working projects, due to more burocracy, insurances and the new policies.

Smart working requires companies to work on four important assets:

– organisational policies,
– space layout
– worker’s behaviour and style of leadership
– digital technologies.

Regarding the latter, the 59% of the large businesses have introduced new technologies to support their agile working projects while 1 company out of 4 has encourage employees to use their own devices.

On the other hand, space layout is going through a real revolution: 71% of the companies have diminshed private offices and 79% have design new break and relax areas for informal meetings. Companies have also invested on individual lockers (64%), phone boots (57%) and touch down workstations (57%).

Although, only 37% of the companies managed to star a smart working project using only internal resources, while 40% seek the advice of an external consultant (40%) and research centres (34%).

Lastly, smart workers resulted to be happier about the way the can organized their working activity (39%), choosing mainly to work from home (80% in large business – 100% in public administration).

Smart Working Award 2018
Smart Working Award is a prize given to the most significant smart working designed working environment. These are the project awarded in 2018:
A2A, Gruppo Hera, Intesa Sanpaolo, Maire Tecnimont.
Zurich, invece, si è aggiudicata la prima edizione dello Smart Working Impact Award.


Testo di Gabriele Masi.
Foto da Osservatorio Smart Working PoliMi.