Digital-social innovation and skills alignment in the SuperSmart Society: An empirical study of workplace in the post-pandemic Italy

In recent years the organization system has brought out main issues due to the pandemic, which pushed fundamental digital changes. Digital-based working is a radical work re-configuration adopted during Corona pandemic all over the world, and more significantly in developed countries. Working remotely has changed the work environment and has influenced workers’ well-being. This paper aims at investigating public and private employees’ sociological conditions under pandemic, specifically focusing on the consequences of digital (or so-called smart) working on the employees’ degree of satisfaction. Administering a survey to a randomly selected sample of Italian workers, the results evidenced that smart working produced both advantages (co-called skills) and disadvantages (hurdles) on the sociological conditions of the employees. Adopting econometric regression, we documented that digital skills and hurdles have no significant impact on the worker’s satisfaction about smart working, whereas social skills significantly affect it. This paper offers new perspectives about smart working and its sociological implications, suggesting that we are currently witnessing a permanent change in job arrangements, supporting a new approach, based on human resource digital evolution, as a result of the “technological adaptation” embraced by workers in the period of Corona-driven lock-down.