Today in Milan is Smart Working Day. That means companies are adopting every possible measure to stagger arrival times or promote remote working, ensuring productivity from all their employees without forcing them to queue in rush-hour traffic. Here's how it came about and why.
The time lost sitting in queues in Italy's six most congested cities has a value exceeding 5 billion euros a year. Not to mention personal stress and smog.
So, on 6 February 2014 Milan City Council launched an experimental day, the first Smart Working Day, with a formula based on agreements with large companies to stagger their employees' arrival times at work, so as to spread the impact of commuter traffic on road congestion across the entire morning.
This year, Smart Working Day 2016 falls on 18 February.
The time lost sitting in queues translates into a cost that, according to an analysis by the Fondazione Caracciolo for the Aci — based on data from TomTom, Heatco, Isfort, Euromobility and Epomm — in Italy's six most congested cities (Palermo, Rome, Milan, Naples, Genoa and Turin) exceeds 5 billion euros a year. In the capital alone, to give one example, the costs attributable to traffic reach 2.3 billion euros, averaging 1,005.91 euros per motorist and 722.75 euros per public transport user.
However, the authors of the study note that Palermo is the Italian city with the highest average annual per-capita cost, at 1,137.48 euros per motorist travelling the roads of the Sicilian regional capital, and 817.29 euros per public transport user.
A great deal of research naturally confirms the correlation between road traffic congestion in large cities and the standardised working hours applied by all companies across every productive sector, suggesting that staggering should be organised by sector as well as by geographical area.
According to the telecommunications industry consortium, if companies across Europe were to actively commit to promoting remote working and the most advanced communication methods, 50 million tonnes of CO2 would be saved every year.
According to the Smart Working Observatory of the School of Management at the Politecnico di Milano, greater use of technological solutions and remote working could increase each employee's productivity by 25%. Smart working via broadband, the development and spread of ICT technologies to support communication, collaboration and the creation of social networks and desktop communication networks is a model that delivers significant benefits first and foremost for businesses, with an increase in the average worker's productivity of 25% (which can reach up to 50% more) and a reduction in labour costs of around 1.7 billion euros. But it also offers important advantages for the entire social system: if just 10% of workers who currently commute by car were to adopt remote working for 100 days a year, the overall savings would amount to 47 million hours of time, 407 million euros in money, and 307,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
Particularly noteworthy for this Smart Working Day is the initiative by Copernico Where Things Happen, which has decided to open the doors of its concept building Copernico Milano Centrale for an entire day of smart working. The "agile workers" who choose to spend the day carrying out their professional activities outside their usual environment or their own company will be able to opt to be taken in by one of Copernico's 130 companies, which will make a meeting and exchange space available. What's more, this year Copernico has decided to stimulate the community's creativity by hosting an exceptional "smartworker": artist Gianni Moretti, who moves his studio to the terrace overlooking the park to work on his creations and involve those present in a creative workshop. Smart and agile.