The weekend science ticket with, like every weekend, Mathilde Fontez, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloon. Today, we are talking about telework, while the government recommended at the beginning of the week to practice it two or three days a week, because of the 5th wave of Covid-19.
franceinfo: What results for this practice? What do the studies say?
Mathilde Fontez: The studies are numerous. It must be said that the change in practice is significant. This is one of the major upheavals caused by the pandemic: the number of people who telework regularly has multiplied by 2. And the results are mixed …
Individually, it is positive …
Not entirely. On the one hand, we stress less, we sleep up to an hour more per day, when we telecommute. We have more time for our loved ones and for ourselves. And we work almost 50 minutes more per day than face-to-face. We are also more productive: 60% of teleworkers feel more focused.
But on the other hand, teleworking multiplies by 3 the risks of low back pain – we are often less well installed to work at home. There are the problems posed by the merging of professional and personal life, which is not without consequences for the well-being. Studies also point to cognitive exhaustion. And there is the phenomenon of “fatigue zoom” …
Video fatigue?
That’s it: a team of American psychologists has just studied it. They followed 103 employees for 4 weeks. And they highlight a fairly clear phenomenon, video puts pressure on us: we feel more watched, more judged in video meetings, than face-to-face. We focus more on the impression we send back, and that tires us out. This is a phenomenon that only occurs when the camera is turned on of course.
And the worst part is that there is a kind of vicious circle that starts in video: as we are stressed, it is more difficult to make our voice heard in meetings. We become inaudible. And that further increases our stress.
And the carbon footprint of teleworking?
This is where studies give a fairly good result. contrintuitive: telework, in fact, is not so virtuous for the climate. Its generalization would have a modest effect, if any, on greenhouse gas emissions.
First, there is the energy weight of visios: today we are starting to measure that our remote communications are not without consequences, that a video, or even an email, is a server running somewhere. in the world, which must be manufactured, cooled, in short, which emits greenhouse gases.
And above all, there are our practices: studies show that teleworkers tend to move away from their workplace, and in the end, to increase the distance they cover each week. The other effect is that they abandon public transport in favor of the car – the transport subscription becomes less profitable.
All this combined, it brings the balance sheet to zero.