The American multinational announced to its administrative employees on Monday that they would have to return to the office and stop teleworking. Is such a return to the past possible in France?
Is teleworking under threat in France? If French companies are taking inspiration from the giant Amazon, employees used to working from home may fear it. The American company informed its administrative employees on Monday, September 16, that they would have to return to the office full time.
A return to the pre-Covid-19 situation is unlikely to happen again in France, according to Benoît Serre, the deputy vice-president of the National Association of HR Directors (ANDRH). However, French companies are not hesitating to backtrack and are putting limits on teleworking. “It is about regulating the occasions of distance, not to prohibit them, but to prevent them from happening at any time”explains the deputy vice-president of ANDRH.
franceinfo: Amazon announces that it wants to end teleworking, does that surprise you? ?
Benoît Serre: Yes and no. Companies in the United States, especially in tech, had considerably promoted “full telework”, full-time telework, at the time of Covid. Some of them even said that people would be able to work wherever they wanted, etc. So in a way, it’s a bit of a return to sender because we knew it wouldn’t work.
In France, you have very few companies that claim full-time telework because it has quite harmful effects on the functioning of the organization and I am not convinced that people are so attached to it. So I am not very surprised by these movements in companies in the United States.
Afterwards, you have to understand that Amazon is a company where some of its employees have been “fully teleworking” while its warehouses, by definition, are not. So I imagine that it is not illogical that Amazon realized that there was still a kind of curiosity from a management point of view in having some of its employees forced to be present in distribution platforms and a whole other part who ultimately never came.
Do companies in France want to return to teleworking?
In France, there is no return movement, it is more of an organizational movement. We must not lose sight of the fact that France was a country where there were relatively few teleworkers before the Covid crisis. The pandemic meant that telework arrived massively and in a rather disorderly way. So we more or less organized things quickly, and then they settled in.
Now that we have come out of this crisis and have acquired, in a way, a form of experience, the flaws and qualities of telework are appearing in organizations. Consequently, companies are rather organizing it, structuring it, and therefore making it a little less “open bar”, without limits, with employees who come when they want. Moreover, this is the best way to ensure that telework continues.
“If we continue to keep teleworking without organization, where everyone does what they want, it will disappear. The organization of the company still requires that people see and talk to each other.”
Benoît Serre, Deputy Vice-President of ANDRHto franceinfo
What limits do companies want to place on teleworking?
What companies often put in place is to define certain moments in the life of the company that require physical presence. Then, there is a limitation on the number of days – two days per week generally – and a setting of validation rules. In other words, no longer allowing the employee to decide on their own not to come one morning because they looked at their diary and do not see the need to come. And then, you have companies, for example, that have management committees, department meetings, or annual interviews that cannot be done remotely. In a way, it is about regulating the opportunities for distance, not to prohibit them, but to prevent them from happening at any time.
Do these limits not risk contradicting the needs and desires of employees?
It’s always a bit of the same problem. I believe, and I observe, that people’s deep aspiration is to have models that are a little less hierarchical and to have a little more freedom of organization in their work.
It turns out that teleworking is one of the ways, but it is not the only way. You also have greater freedom of organization when you are trusted more, when you are less in control regimes, etc. This is the real aspiration that must be met, that is certain.
“The desire for greater freedom of organization for the moment involves teleworking, but if it is to become established in the long term, it will undoubtedly involve a revision of the management model which, particularly in France, are models very much based on presenteeism.”
Benoît Serre, Deputy Vice-President of ANDRHto franceinfo
We value presence. However, when we studied whether teleworking degrades or enhances the productivity of the individual, we realized that in the end, it didn’t change it that much. For a simple reason, someone who is not very motivated or not very active in their professional activity when they are in the office will not be any more so when they are remote. Someone who is rather motivated and active in their professional activity in the company is just as motivated remotely or in person.
How can management reverse the teleworking implemented in the company?
It depends on the conditions in which she set up teleworking. In France, you have two ways of setting it up. First, you can go through an agreement with the social partners. This is the case in many companies. Moreover, we hear a lot about teleworking at the moment because these are three-year agreements that were often negotiated in 2020-2021 and are coming to an end.
Otherwise, the company has installed teleworking by charter, that is to say without negotiation. In this case, it can change it in the same way, therefore without negotiation. Many companies have instead chosen to have a social dialogue, and that is fortunate.
Can the employee refuse these new teleworking rules?
It is difficult because teleworking has been a right since the end of the 2000s. If a company refuses partial teleworking to someone, it must justify it. On the other hand, if you have a charter or a collective agreement, employees are obliged to subscribe to it and apply it, as with an internal regulation in a company.
For example, you have companies that have long banned teleworking when you are abroad. The employer can absolutely impose it either by negotiation or by charter on its employees. The employee therefore does not have the right to refuse it.
Conversely, the company cannot impose telework on its employees – unless there is an agreement, again. Some employees refuse telework because they have living or installation conditions that make them better off in the office. Ultimately, there have been developments in company premises to set up what are called flexible offices where there is enough space to accommodate everyone, if they all want to come.