“It’s quite unprecedented”: teleworking and productivity, a backlash?

“It’s quite unprecedented”: teleworking and productivity, a backlash?
“It’s quite unprecedented”: teleworking and productivity, a backlash?

2. No return to the situation before the health crisis

We notice that companies are going backwards, but these are mainly those which had gone very far in terms of teleworking possibilities.“, indicates Laurent Taskin, professor at the Louvain School of Management and holder of the Chair in Human Management and Society (H lab). Some employers indeed had a very broad policy in this area: unlimited teleworking, presence in the office from 4 to 6 days per month… This return to the office will undoubtedly have to be made with some adaptations because many organizations have taken the opportunity to reduce their work spaces. It will be necessary to organize rotations for teams in this department on Monday and Tuesday. such another on Thursday and Friday. changing every 6 months to avoid favoritism.But if we observe a step backwards on the part of certain employers, we are not going to return to the pre-Covid situation. This is certainly not the end of teleworking. Employers will continue to offer it if they want to attract and retain their employees… who are very sensitive to the balance between private and professional life.”notes Laurent Taskin”, which reminds us that teleworking is not a right. “The CCTs governing teleworking in Belgium insist on the fact that it is a method of organizing work offered by the employer, not a right of employees. This is why the CCTs leave room for maneuver to management in arranging modalities locally.”

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Collective presence, the fact of being with colleagues, eating together, meeting at the coffee machine, all of this (…) allows us to deliberate together, to solve problems, to innovate, to be creative.”

More than 30 million kilometers avoided every day thanks to teleworking

3. Productivity, team spirit and management

So what are employers’ arguments for bringing employees back to the office? The need to control the work carried out? “No because the control can be done remotely anyway”says the LSM professor. Productivity? “Studies show that teleworking is no longer a factor of increased productivity as it was before Covid. The trend is rather towards similar productivity, whether we are in the office or at home. Some studies, but more rare and especially in the United States or Japan, even indicate a loss of productivity with the increase in teleworking. This is quite unprecedented because for thirty years and until 2020, studies associated teleworking (with a maximum of 50% of total working time) and increased productivity.”

Should we come back to the office for team building? “Certainly. We see that what is disintegrating is the link to the organization. However, the collective presence, the fact of being with colleagues, of eating together, of meeting at the coffee machine – this famous coffee machine!–, all this is constitutive of work communities and contributes to giving meaning to work. Physical contiguity allows us to deliberate together, to solve problems, to innovate, to be creative.continues Laurent Taskin, who once again highlights the question of management. “Not in the dimension of control but in that of team leadership and work organization. Employees expect closeness with their manager who needs to feel this physical presence to add human depth to his management and find meaning in his supervisory work.”

4. This is not a wish of the workers

Even if some workers express the need to get together, we see instead that they prefer to maximize a proportion of teleworking and do not themselves wish to return to a more sustained collective presence. “They are not ready to mourn their individual comfort.

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The approach has changed. “From 2020, the issue was less about regulating individual absence (with collective agreements specifying how many days each person could telework, which has occupied companies since the end of the 90s) than about regulating collective presence. The question then is: how many days should we come to the office, and not just to be present but to be together? The challenge is to re-inhabit the collective space which capitalizes on collective presence. If everyone comes to the office to work in their own corner, there is not much point. The idea is to be together to do things together. Likewise, we can no longer focus on optimizing individual well-being, we must now be concerned about collective well-being by putting the organizational project at the center, the one that brings people together. This is what we observe today with these procrastination: the company is trying to reclaim the organization of work beyond responding to individual needs.estimates the LSM professor. And to discuss the new role of community builderthe collective builder, which those responsible for Human Management must urgently endorse. “The collective was self-evident before teleworking became the norm. We must now reinvest this collective, which constitutes a stimulating and meaningful project for the management of the company.”

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