What will the public administration be like after the pandemic?
How is the use of remote work in the Public Administration going during the pandemic? The in-depth analysis by Alfredo Ferrante, public executive
It is very useful to read the article on the use of remote work in public administrations during the pandemic recently published by the Bank of Italy: the two authors, Walter Giuzio and Lucia Rizzica , offer, in fact, an articulated data framework that finally allows , a first reading of the performance of the PA struggling with emergency agile work. Interesting before and after Covid: in the face of a scarce diffusion of the remote working tool up to the end of 2019, the use of agile ways of working literally exploded in 2020 , reaching a percentage of public workers who have carried out at least once a week their work from home by 33%, compared to 2.4% the previous year. I have argued previously to what this excessive shyness was due: the structures had considered the institute, up to the spread of the epidemic, as little more than an exceptional parenthesis compared to the ordinary conduct of activities, without really affecting the organizational fabric deep of the machine, all in all annoyed by what was perceived as a further fulfillment. Not causally, the study notes, Italy in 2019 was the European country, compared to France, Germany and Spain, in which the spread of agile work was lower, testifying, among other things, to the transversal cultural resistance to changing practices consolidated. With the pandemic, everything changes : the need to minimize social opportunities as dangerous multipliers of the spread of the virus requires the sudden expansion of smart working in the PA, drastically changing, from one day to the next, the comfort zone of public personnel and making evident the first criticalities in terms of enabling conditions.
The results of the research return an extremely interesting picture, highlighting, for example, that the South has made less use of the instrument and that sectors such as health, for obvious reasons, have been less affected by the novelty. Two main factors come into play. On the one hand, the individual characteristics of the worker , with a greater propensity of women, alongside the more educated workers, to take advantage of agile work, as they are engaged with the loads of family care, and of the more operational workers who, before Covid, they were hardly involved in the new way of working. On the other hand, the need clearly emerges to have adequate skills and tools (primarily IT) to fully exploit the potential of the tool. Due to the proximity of services, the municipalities have used agile work less than the regions also because, the study hypothesizes, it significantly highlights the poor ability of citizens to interact through electronic platforms, also due to their low level of diffusion. local. In short, the Authors conclude, the percentage of memory of agile work sees “ a natural limit to the teleworkability of the functions performed in the public sector . In some cases, such as in the education sector, this limit has also been largely exceeded with effects on the quality of the services provided that will need to be evaluated. In other cases, such as in the PA in the strict sense, this limit has not been reached. This seems to be linked to the reduced skills of the staff, while the investments in IT equipment supported by the institutions did not have a significant impact ", also because" marginal dictated by the emergency (the strengthening of individual equipment) and not by significant technological advancements ", to indicate that such investments "should be accompanied by investments in the digital skills of workers, especially where they are less young".
These are elements that will obviously need to be taken into account in the current management of a still hybrid regime, which will remain so until the epidemic disappears, and, in perspective, a strategic and long-term approach to a new organization of work that sees the spread of smart working in the terms indicated by the most recent legislation which sees an extension of the possibility of using agile work to at least 60% of public personnel. Although the percentage refers to the activities actually compatible with the remote mode, it is evident that the very strong transformative drive underway requires specific and continuous attention to the correct management of the tool. As? Meanwhile, in relation to the evaluation of results : as reported by the recent Guidelines on the adoption of organizational plans for agile work (the so-called POLA), "the need to identify the expected results in a timely manner is even more important, both in relation to the activity carried out and the behaviors carried out, also because it must be clear that the measurement and evaluation system is unique and regardless of whether the service is provided in the office, in a different place or in mixed mode ". This perspective serves, immediately, to remove from the table the misunderstanding that the activity rendered remotely is different from that rendered in the presence but must also respond to a further, renewed need. So far the evaluation systems, it has been argued for some reason, have been substantially set up – and managed – "in a way that is functional only to the need to legitimize the distribution of reward institutes rather than as one of the management levers of the employment relationship and orientation towards certain, tangible and verifiable results ". What's more: the management of these systems has not yet made clear the growth function of the organization whose performance must be measured and then evaluated. In other words, the healthy jolt represented by forced agile labor can finally contribute to achieving that paradigm shift that shifts the axis from the reward / punishment theme to that of overall growth of the organization , with a view to general improvement.
The overall picture drawn up by the Guidelines, whose development will be supported by the activity of the newly established National Observatory of agile work in public administrations , is punctual and detailed. It should be borne in mind, however, that two fundamental interventions must be carried out simultaneously if the opportunity provided by the long wave of smart working is to be fully exploited. The first is, as clearly indicated by the Bank of Italy study, a massive investment in IT equipment and infrastructures and in workers' digital skills : a year of emergency has made it clear that time can no longer be lost and that it is necessary to consolidate, without hesitation, the electronic backbone of our public machine, right down to the branches of local administrations, which provide essential services to citizens. The National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) allocates, thanks to the Next Generation EU , almost 12 billion euros on the digitization and modernization of the PA, which must be spent well and in a targeted manner. But who will have to manage the public administration of tomorrow, digitalized and smart ? And how? It is clear that the main effort will have to be to act on the recruitment of public personnel . We are facing an unexpected opportunity of epochal significance, the unwanted consequence of an unexpected pandemic: the violence with which the economic and social crisis is affecting and will affect our country has made it clear, once and for all, that Italy it cannot but count, in its national heritage, on an advanced public machine in step with increasingly complex challenges. We have the possibility, as a country system, to carry out, also thanks to the funds that the EU makes available, a profound transformation, which at the same time affects people and how they will work . In this delicate phase of transition, it is essential to think about how to attract human resources who bring, alongside a solid administrative-accounting base, characteristics and talents that today still matter too little in public administration. In other words, it is necessary to work on finding human resources, at all levels, which profoundly innovate schemes that are now obsolete to make public organizations grow in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. The moment is, hopelessly, propitious: will we be able to grasp it?
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/come-sara-la-pubblica-amministrazione-dopo-la-pandemia/ on Mon, 25 Jan 2021 08:42:22 +0000.