The study aims at demonstrating how social communication has changed in terms of flows and content in the different phases of the COVID‐19 pandemic to get to the fact that public administrations have embarked on a path of rapprochement with the citizen that starts from the methods of communication and interaction. This article presents an exploratory and multidisciplinary study conducted through the analysis of the Facebook page of the Italian municipalities with the highest Covid19‐induced mortality rates (Piacenza, Bergamo, Lodi, Cremona, Brescia, Pavia, Parma, Mantova, Alessandria, Lecco and Sondrio). Fanpage Karma has been used to conduct the investigation and get the analytics. Local governments are implementing a process of gradual approach to the needs of the citizen and learning new ways of communication. In the conclusion of our study – conducted at the time of the pandemic – we can affirm that local governments are in an early stage of the process both for the acquisition of skills for social communication and for the definition of a communication strategy to strengthen their social identity aware of the fact that the agile and lean communication makes the citizen much more informed and involved in city life than traditional communication. This paper analyses a social network like Facebook as a not common tool for local government's communication in a period of severe emergency. A multidisciplinary approach is adopted as a distinctive factor. The focus is on the contribution of social communication on citizens' engagement.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze how remote working has been carried out during the first wave of the pandemic in Italian SMEs, representing at the same time an organizational challenge and an excellent opportunity for individual and organizational learning. Design/methodology/approach This paper involved 60 Italian SMEs of various sectors and 330 employees: 217 clerks (average age 42) and 113 managers (average age 48) belonging to different functional units and with a different education backgrounds. Two different questionnaires, one addressed to clerks and one to managers/executives who coordinate the remote working activity, were prepared and sent. This paper investigates the issues of perceived productivity, technological preparation, coordination, programming and control with specific attention to how the participants faced the remote working experience from the learning point of view. Findings Before the pandemic, Italian SMEs did not feel the necessity to adopt a structured policy on remote working. The COVID-19 emergency has forced them to consider that working remotely is possible and can produce benefits and positive results for what they learned in terms of autonomy, motivation and trust, to the detriment of physical presence, which is not as fundamental to ensure productivity. Originality/value While large, formalized and structured companies encountered modest difficulties being already technologically and culturally prepared for remote working, the big challenge was that of SMEs, who found themselves obliged to adopt it. This paper examines how Italian SMEs lived and evaluated the switch to a new work organization and turned it into an occasion for workplace learning.

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