Bankitalia: smart working has a neutral impact on productivity

Smart working has been, on average, neither an accelerator nor an obstacle to the productivity of Italian companies which, until Covid, used it little but, since then, it has remained a rather widespread modality. After the first forecasts and studies (and strong controversy), the Bank of Italy, in a paper, thanks to a more robust and longer database (from 2019 to 2023) comes to this conclusion with a caveat: there is heterogeneity among the different classes of companies. Smart, however, has 'had a negligible impact on firms' output (measured in terms of revenue or quantity), labour input (number of employees or hours worked), and has not affected the composition of the workforce, profits, variable costs or investments in 4.0 technologies'.

The research thus shows that precisely those companies that used remote working before the pandemic are the ones that experienced a productivity benefit and continued to use it. The "positive experiences of remote working may have mitigated initial concerns about it "m the researchers write. "In contrast, firms that were highly resistant" to smart worlking "before the pandemic experienced worse effects on productivity and were less likely to continue using remote work after the emergency ended."

"Overall, these results suggest that uncertainty plays a significant role in the implementation of remote working and that the large social experiment triggered by the pandemic has mitigated these problems for only a fraction of companies," they read. A heterogeneity therefore, the authors note, that will have to be taken into account in future research examining the effects on hiring practices, investments in advanced digital technologies, and managerial practices.