**7. The covid risk and the impact of the digitalization of work**

The pandemic had a significant impact on every dimension of the world of work, but the one that was most disrupted was health and safety. The explosion of an event with disruptive potential in terms of risks to the health of workers and the entire population has led, in the space of a few days, to drastic choices with the closure of many activities and to stringent measures that have seen a vast adjustment by part of the companies. These have been committed, both from an organizational and economic point of view, not only to guarantee the minimum prevention measures (from sanitization to the distribution of masks, as many as 98% of Italian companies have done so) [17], but also to provide adequate information to employees (94.7%), provide specific training (90.4%), rotate staff or program staggered access and exits (70%), make various types of tests available to collaborators (52%) and exempt the most fragile workers or with specific assistance problems from the obligation to be present (46.2%). Measures that have transversally affected the business world, from large to small which, despite a 1000 difficulties, have nevertheless adapted their organizational and management models to the standards imposed by the pandemic: standards in many cases onerous, both from an organizational point of view than cheap. The efforts were rewarded by the results, with containment of accidents from Covid in the workplace and causes of mortality: as of March 31, 2021, Inail accounted for 165,000 accident reports from Covid, mostly concentrated in the health sector (67.5%), of which 551 with fatal outcome. This is a high figure, considering the overall impact of Covid accidents on the total of those reported (infections caused by the Sars-Cov-2 virus in 2020 accounted for 23.6% of reports and 33.3% of those fatal), but relatively contained when compared to the effects, in terms of infections and mortality, produced by the epidemic.

At the same time, the widespread use of agile work as the main tool for preventing the spread of infections in the workplace, in addition to containing the risk, has had the positive effect of producing a significant drop in accidents while traveling. This dynamic marks an important discontinuity with respect to the trends of recent years which, in the face of stability of accidents in the workplace, had seen the number of those in transit progressively increase, especially among women.

The development of smart working as a new organizational model, if on the one hand has positive effects with reference to accidents and mortality at work, on the other, poses new challenges in terms of health and safety. A growing responsibility of the worker is necessary and required, who are asked to collaborate to better organize their domestic work station, in order to ensure adequate safety and prevent the occurrence of accidents or the onset of diseases. In this context, the risk margins potentially linked to the safety of a work environment that can vary over time widen (27% of agile workers worked from a place other than their home, even for prolonged periods), which is not said it complies with the minimum plant safety regulations (electrical, fire prevention) or that it has adequate and equipped workplaces and environments according to ergonomic criteria.

To these aspects is added the risk of increased stress produced by the expansion of working times, by performance anxiety, by the weakening of company relations, and by the fear of marginalization, already identified by various surveys by almost half of the agile workers such as elements of the discomfort of working remotely. These are the first elements of an experience that is still being evaluated, but whose impact on the health and safety dimension could be disruptive, both in terms of limiting the accident phenomenon and innovating the prevention and safety logic, which must be made more functional to the new organizational models. The emergency, in addition to making "the risk" tangible and real, has brought this dimension to the center of the strategies and of the company organization, paving the way for an unexpected

coincidence of interests between the parties: health protection on the one hand, and safeguarding business activity on the other. An important step which, induced by the emergency of the moment and the need to adopt all the necessary measures to contain risks and infections, also resulted in the launch of a more participatory model of health and safety management in the company, which has become a shared value between all the parties, who have undertaken to implement, in a logic of prevalent collaboration, the most suitable measures to protect the health of workers on the one hand and the business activity on the other. The extraordinary survey carried out by Istat in December 2020 [17] on Italian companies with more than three employees, clearly highlights from this point of view the significant effort made by Italian companies to adapt to health protocols and the new rules and obligations imposed by the pandemic. It should be considered that 58.7% of the companies had to make changes to the work environments to ensure spacing, through the use of barriers, signs to trace different paths: a measure that is strongly conditioned by the size of the structures, affecting especially the large ones with more than 250 employees, where "structural" interventions were made by 85.9% and to a lesser extent, but still important, the small ones, as even among companies with less than 10 employees, are 57% are involved in these types of initiatives. In the face of the measures relating to the work environment, the companies had to make important organizational interventions to ensure safety within the premises, in compliance with the health protocols provided. The experience of the last year has led to new leadership of companies and employees in the management of safety at work, which could mark an important step towards a more participatory and shared intervention logic.

The challenge of the Fourth Capitalism, the ongoing digitization, and the characteristics of the new organizational models of work entail in any case new risk factors for the health of citizens, which must be faced with tools, rules, and with a different culture of prevention, of work, and corporate well-being.
