This text is taken from Courrier de l’ économique. Click here to subscribe.
The affair is often presented as a clash between two irreconcilable groups. On the one hand, there would be more and more employers determined to signal the end of recess now that the COVID-19 pandemic is largely behind us and to now demand that their employees return to work in the office. On the other hand, there would be workers who have tasted the pleasure of teleworking and who would not want to hear anything about it. But the reality seems less cut and dry.
It’s true that the image is strong. The American company Zoom — the same one that provided one of the videoconferencing platforms that everyone fell back on when the pandemic forced us to stay indoors — is now requiring that its employees return to work in the office, from least two days a week.
The anecdote has been repeated almost everywhere to illustrate the growing desire of employers to close the parenthesis opened by COVID and return to a certain form of pre-pandemic normality.
Even if we initially said the opposite, practice and the latest research by experts seem to indicate that teleworking results in a certain loss of productivity, in particular because workers communicate less effectively with each other and they miss opportunities to network and learn. Working in hybrid mode (partially remote and partially on-site), however, would negate this problem, and could even have the opposite effect.
And then, it’s not just productivity that counts in life, experts remind us. There is also the well-being of employees for whom teleworking is synonymous with less time lost in traffic and better work-life balance. A factor to which employers are inclined to pay even more attention when they are faced, as in Quebec, with a shortage of labor.
They are right to be cautious, an Angus Reid poll reported this spring. Half of Canadian workers say they prefer to work mainly from home, and among them, one in five would resign if they were forced to come to the office every day, and a third would start looking to see if they could find something better elsewhere.
Between a quarter and half of workers
In fact, just under two in five Canadians hold a job that could theoretically lend itself to teleworking, Statistics Canada estimated before the pandemic. Last month, just under 14% of workers operated exclusively from home, a percentage down 3.2 points from last year. They are found in particular in public administration (21%), financial and real estate services (30%) and the professional, scientific and technical sectors (41%).
Ten percent tended to have a hybrid work style and worked mainly in the office on Wednesdays (51%), Tuesdays (50%) and Thursdays (48%), with Mondays (42%) and Fridays (37%) proving less popular. .
According to recent surveys by the Order of Certified Human Resources Advisors (CRHA), 37% of Quebecers (43% of workers in the Montreal region and 50% of those in Quebec) would engage in one form or the other teleworking, and 8% could do so if they wanted.
Nine out of ten workers who are entitled to this arrangement say they are satisfied with it, compared to 66% of Quebecers who work only in the office.
Two-thirds of downtown Montreal employees surveyed this spring on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal said they would like at least some presence in the office to be imposed in order to increase productivity and socialize with their colleagues. , to develop their professional network and benefit from the support of their managers. Among the remaining third, we find workers who live far from the city center (68%), who have children (55%) or who are aged 18 to 34 (59%).
Still, this still leaves a little more than three out of five employees in the country who do not want to hear about a policy imposing mandatory presence in the office. However, more than 70% of their employers wanted the opposite: 25% expect to see their employees in the office every day, and 46% speak instead of a hybrid mode associated with a mandatory minimum number of days of presence.
Refine your look
All these discussions about different ways of organizing work and a minimum number of days in the office miss the point if we stick to generalizations and don’t take reality into account from the field, explained, already two years ago Duty professor at the School of Industrial Relations at the University of Montreal, Tania Saba. “Two or three days of teleworking per week for whom? For what ? It makes no sense to make such decisions if it is not based on an in-depth analysis of the nature of each person’s tasks and the best way to accomplish them. »
Until now, less than one in five Quebec companies have adopted a hybrid mode work policy whose requirements have been adapted to the tasks, activities and nature of the job, reports the CRHA.
However, businesses have not finished adapting, with at least a third of them still expecting to change the way they operate during the year. Nearly a quarter have, however, adopted rules on their employees’ right to disconnect outside normal working hours or even to “traces”, that is to say the possibility of working remotely for a certain time before or after a vacation.
In all cases, Tania Saba encouraged employers to openly discuss these issues with their employees to find, through trial and error, the best ways of operating. “Often highly educated and accustomed to looking at what they do, teleworkers are in the best position to say what works or not. »