The Confederation of Italian Industry has published a report summarising a wide range of work–life balance practices in small and medium-sized enterprises. Contrary to widespread opinion among employers and their representative associations, improvement of work–life balance is not related to company size or to the company’s financial conditions but it is strongly influenced by the employer’s cultural affirmative attitude and the flexibility of labour relations.
The report Promoting equal opportunities in small and medium-sized enterprises (La promozione delle pari opportunità nelle piccole e medie imprese (923Kb PDF)), published by the Confederation of Italian Industry (Confederazione Generale dell’Industria Italiana, Confindustria), investigates 10 case studies throughout Italy. The training unit of the employer organisation collected 554 measures promoting equal opportunities undertaken by 182 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The study deepens the analysis on quality of work in SMEs with regard to work-life balance and highlights the positive effects that reconciliation measures have in the companies’ performance and in workers’ quality of life.
Low female employment rate
In Italy, the uneven division of domestic work between men and women strongly contributes to explaining the low female employment rate (IT0810069I).
Law No. 53/2000 (in Italian) implementing Council Directive 96/34/EC on the framework agreement on parental leave concluded by the European social partners provides specific funding to projects that enable particular forms of working schedule flexibility and work organisation, such as telework and homeworking, flexitime, time accounts, flexible shifts and concentrated working times. The law also provides for training programmes for the reintegration of workers after a period of leave, as well as projects that allow for the replacement of a company owner or a self-employed person during the period of compulsory leave or parental leave with another employer or self-employed person.
Despite these measures, the Italian employment rate among women is far from the target set in the Lisbon Strategy or the European Union average, amounting to 46.3% in the first quarter of 2009 – 13% less than the EU average.
Family-friendly policies in SMEs
The Confindustria report classifies the 554 equal opportunities measures from 182 SMEs into 31 types and groups 26 of these into three main areas of intervention:
- actions aiming to redress the presence of women in business, such as gender-balanced recruitment and the adoption of verification tools of equal opportunities;
- family-friendly practices, such as flexible working practices and time accounts, childcare and eldercare services, partnership projects for the promotion of services and financial support schemes for the family and caring activities;
- diversity management tools and techniques, such as mentoring, career guidance and counselling, training programmes promoting diversity management, strategic planning and monitoring of diversity.
Family-friendly practices account for 73% of the initiatives: most of them are related to changes in work organisation such as flexible working hours, rest schedules and job rotation, often managed in an informal way. Informality makes it difficult to widen the scope of such practices; however, it allows for testing a large number of interventions to resolve problems of work–life balance involved in everyday working activity. The individualisation of the measures adopted makes it possible to narrow the gap between the limited scope due to the allegedly strict regulatory procedures and the need for flexible interventions due to the evolving challenges of everyday life.
The use of flexible working hours is an increasing practice among men as well as representing an opportunity for fathers to manage their work commitments with the caring responsibility. In a medium-sized enterprise operating in the distribution and design of power plants in the northern city of Milan, for example, the company has adopted flexible working arrangements, allowing wide flexibility and the adoption of a schedule to work from home in order to facilitate their employees, especially women. These initiatives have been welcomed and are also used by men, for example for bringing their children to school or for leisure activities. This has encouraged the sharing of caring responsibilities between the couples, thus reducing the lack of balance in this regard highlighted by a 2008 report of the National Institute for Statistics (Istituto Nazionale di Statistica, Istat). According to this report, Reconciling work and family (in Italian, 2.7Mb PDF), this imbalance is the main cause of the low female employment rate and gender segregation in the workplace.
Benefits of work–life balance policies
The Confindustria report highlights that the need for work–life balance policies is highly relevant among both employees and employers, as these policies play a crucial role in promoting women’s participation in the labour market and in improving companies’ performance. Thus, the dominance of restricted work organisation patterns is still an important limiting factor for women’s participation in the Italian labour market.
SMEs introducing work–life balance practices share several common characteristics: most of them pertain to attitudes and behaviours typical of an innovation-based enterprise, where the company management is more attentive to enhancing equal opportunities, regardless of the availability of financial resources.
Further information
More information on work–life balance at EU level is available on the Eurofound website.
Tania Toffanin, Cesos