An Italian friend asked me what we call “smart working” in the United States, and I said we don’t. I looked it up, and stumbled on a post by an Italian living in the UK, who explains it pretty well:
In Italy, smart working was originally introduced as a legal framework in 2017. Its goal was to give employees more flexibility in where and when they worked, aligning Italy with global trends in labour reform. However, the COVID pandemic forced its widespread adoption almost overnight. Italians, many of whom had never worked remotely before, suddenly found themselves grappling with this new reality. “Smart working” quickly became shorthand for the mass exodus from offices and the shift to home-based work setups, in a way that fundamentally altered the country’s approach to labour.
The legal part I wasn’t really aware about, since I’d already moved by then. The rest I’d figured out. But
nowhere else in the world is “smart working” used as a term for remote work. In fact, the phrase in Italy encapsulates two distinct concepts that Italians seem to have merged—working remotely and towards business objectives. These are fundamentally distinct ideas, which do work well together, but in the Italian context, they have been squashed into one unified framework, which has resulted in an obnoxious gatekeeping on how people are doing remote—the separation between doing “real smart working” and “just remote working” is a rather contentious topic in the Italian-speaking LinkedIn, with the connotation that while the former is the real deal, the latter is its much more basic, less sophisticated sibling.
That’s the Italian way: a murky concept with an English name, which perhaps is supposed to legitimize it. But instead of being beneficial to workers and work relationships, it’s become a burden for both workers and managers:
[T]he concept of “smart working” in Italy isn’t gaining much traction among Italian managers. Combining the expectations of remote work with the idea of working towards objectives—a system that demands trust, accountability, and a level of managerial oversight many leaders aren’t equipped to provide—is fair, as it’s fair to say that most of us who were working remotely way before it was mandated in 2020 agree that working towards objectives is the right way, but for a country that was always mostly about how many hours you were at your workstation, the “smart working” framework becomes a cumbersome beast.
And here’s what’s going to surprise exactly no one:
Indeed, many Italian managers see “smart working” as a challenge to the very foundations of their authority. They are accustomed to having their workforce physically present, a preference that stems from an outdated mindset equating control with visibility and performance with how much time was spent at work. This mentality makes it difficult to embrace the freedom and trust inherent in an effective remote work setup. For them, “smart working” is too risky—it’s easier to abandon the concept entirely than to grapple with the managerial complexities it brings.
To be fair, Italy isn’t the only country where there’s been a push to go back to the office since the pandemic, but as far as I’ve heard from family and friends it started happening way sooner than in the US, even for jobs that could easily be done remotely.