Abstract

Background: When the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, many private companies and public administrations had to resort to working-from-home arrangements for their employees. While remote working was rather uncommon before the pandemic, this became the prevalent work arrangement for a large fraction of the working population. This shift did not take place homogeneously: the extent to which each firm adopted this strategy depends on the type of industry. Objective: Aim of the analysis is to investigate the workers transition to teleworking evaluating the impact of demographic and jobs’ characteristics on the probability of having worked from home, partially or totally, during both waves of the pandemic. Methods: The data used in this article are from the last Ninth Survey on Labour Participation and Unemployment (PLUS), thus a sample survey on the Italian labour market supply developed and administered by the National Institute for the Analysis of Public Policies (INAPP). This survey contains information about social categories, income, education and employment conditions for 50,000 individuals between 18 and 74 years old. The primary objective of the INAPP-PLUS survey is to provide reliable statistics on phenomena rarely or marginally explored by other surveys on the Italian labour market. In fact, although the Labour Force Survey by the National Institute of Statistics (i.e. ISTAT) provides aggregates and official indicators on the labour market, the INAPP-PLUS survey is mainly aimed to give some insights on specific, particularly problematic aspects, such as the remote working. Using logistic regression model it is possible to estimate the different attitudes among workers more accurately. Conclusion: The research is placed in a constantly changing scenario, which implicates the extension of smart working to different work contexts. Main findings show that homeworking is positively related to the level of information technology skills: this result calls for more investment in IT infrastructure as well as for training of adult workers. Working from home also largely depends on the features of the job, even controlling for many other covariates at the individual level.