Flexibility and work-family balance: a win-win solution for companies? The case of Italy

ABSTRACT

Flexibility of working time is currently coming to the fore, with varying degrees of intensity, in European countries. After a brief analysis of flexibility (origin, characteristics, spread) in Europe, this paper will focus in particular on the Italian case by presenting a phenomenon attracting growing attention: ‘Smart Working.’ This is an innovative approach to work organisation that integrates and exceeds concepts such as teleworking and mobile working, thus questioning traditional constraints (such as physical space or work times and tools) and seeking new balances based on greater freedom for workers, as well as their empowerment. By taking advantage of two recent empirical investigations carried out in Italy (2011–2012) we could illustrates the relevance of S.W. in terms of both aspiration and practice, and its high incidence on core issues such as care, fertility rate, and the daily challenge of balancing family and work. In light of this, we tried to discover whether and under what conditions the introduction of different S.W. forms could be a win-win solution for companies and employees alike.

KEYWORDS:

• Flexibility of working time
• work-family balance
• win-win solution
• Italian case

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sara Mazzucchelli, Ph.D. in Sociology, is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Psychology of the Catholic University of Milan (Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes). She is a member of the Family Studies and Research University Centre (Catholic University of Milan), the International Network on Leave Policies and Research, the Oxford Network of European Fatherhood Researchers (ONEFaR) and the European Sociological Association RN13 Board (Sociology of Families and Intimate lives). Her research interests concern work/family reconciliation, company welfare, family policies and services, the transition to motherhood as well as leave (maternity, paternity, parental) and interconnections between parental employment and early childhood services.

ORCID

Sara Mazzucchelli http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0121-6199

Notes

1 Flexible work programs are work arrangements wherein employees are given greater scheduling freedom in how they fulfil the obligations of their positions. The most commonplace of these programmes is flexitime, which gives workers far greater leeway in terms of the time when they begin and end work, provided they put in the total number of hours required by the employer. Other common flexible working arrangements involve telecommuting, job-sharing, and compressed work weeks.

2 See http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/LV/ALL/?uri=uriserv%3Ac11323; European Union, 2013.

3 The E.U. provides a basic legal framework for working time through its directives on working time (Directive 2003/88/EC) and part-time work (Directive 97/81/EC).

4 There are legal entitlements to part-time work for all employees in Denmark, Germany, Spain, France, Cyprus, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland and Portugal; there are instead legal entitlements to part-time work for employees with care responsibilities in Estonia, Spain, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria, Portugal, Slovenia, Finland, Sweden, UK and Norway. Finally Regulations on overtime and working on atypical hours regarding parents with (young) children are spread in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Portugal and Slovenia.

5 According to Directive 2003/88/EC the average working time for each seven-day period, should not exceed 40 hours.

6 This research used: harmonised data from the 2004 E.U. L.F.S. ad hoc module on work organisation and working time; data on working from home (from E.U. L.F.S. 2004) and on flexibility in terms of working atypical hours (from E.U. L.F.S. 2007).

7 Time banking and annualised hours.

8 The research involved about 600 companies operating in Italy and 1000 professionals (executives, managers and employees) and analysed the phenomenon of S.W. in Italy, by detailing innovative approaches and benefits related to new models of work, in terms of organisational policy, physical layout of work spaces and digital technologies: http://www.osservatori.net/smart_working.

9 There is no clear definition in the literature: S.W. is closely connected with the development of new technologies which, thanks to their portability, accessibility and adaptability, help meet new needs (Forrester, 2014). The most effective I.C.T. technologies are: Social Computing and Unified Communication & Collaboration; Mobile and Cloud Computing.

10 It was a telephone survey based on random landline and mobile telephone numbers. All data were collected by trained interviewers. If the administration mode used does not provide a complete statistical representation of workers in Lombardy, it helps draw a detailed, thorough and truthful description of Lombard employees.

11 As assessed by those who look after to elderly relatives, disabled or dependents.

12 The interviewees were asked to express their opinion on each of the listed items (not at all, little, pretty, much): this justifies the percentage values for the different classes. Recoding was made by combining variables by topic and equal percentage distribution among the different clusters.

13 These results are in line with Alpert and Womble, 2015; Revenson et al., 2016.

14 Investigated also by E.I.G.E. http://eige.europa.eu/rdc/search?t=best+practices&op=Search

15 Lombardy, Piedmont, Friuli Venezia Giulia and the Marches.

16 An analysis of findings from two recent ISTAT investigations had been carried out beforehand to provide an outline of family–work reconciliation in Italy: Return Investigation on the Problematic Nature of Working Trajectories from a Gender Standpoint. Year 2007; Investigation into Living Conditions. Year 2008.

17 In fact, the number of companies currently supporting reconciliation in Italy is negligible. Besides, the focus of the research was to identify companies involved in family–work reconciliation, not in the broader area of corporate welfare that, as is well known, also includes compensation measures and the benefits system.

18 Understood as an increase in fiduciary, reciprocal and collaborative relations. Social Capital, in the relational perspective consists in ‘those characteristics – of form and content – inherent in the structure of social relations that facilitate the cooperative action of individuals, families, social groups and organizations […] a certain kind of social relations, namely those relationships in which people show and practice mutual trust and follow rules of cooperation, solidarity, reciprocity’ (Donati, 2003, p. 33). It is, therefore, ‘not an attribute of individuals or social structures, nor a quality of any and all relationships, but only of social relations that value relational goods’ (Donati, 2003, p. 38). The relational sociology’s concept of CS (Donati, 2007b; Rossi, Bonini, & Mazzucchelli, 2011) is opposed to both the individualistic-instrumental-structuralist perspective (Bourdieu, Coleman) and the holistic-political-culturalist (Putnam, Fukuyama) one.

19 “Why, in your opinion, could your company’s service, measure and/or intervention be considered a good practice?”

20 See http://tlab.it/it/presentation.php.

21 This confirms an observation by Ganster, Fox, and Dwyer (2001): greater autonomy and control in managing one’s work and flexibility in the workplace reduce stress to a greater degree than fewer working hours do.

22 It is important to consider not only a company’s size – in terms of turnover, employees and number of branches – but also the characteristics of its employees’ families and socioeconomic situations, as well as any environmental features.