Teleworking: an indicator of your organization's problems

It's been a year since many companies and employees discovered telecommuting, and for others, drastically increased the intensity of a practice they thought they were familiar with.

One year is enough time to get some feedback, especially as the question arises of determining a more permanent and appropriate framework for this practice.

But to provide the right answers, it's still necessary to ask the right questions, while dispassionately dealing with a subject that's still hot and with which it's not yet possible to have a "peaceful" relationship. And to do that, we need to take telecommuting for what it is, far from the idealized or catastrophic image many people have of it.

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Telecommuting is a way of organizing production, not a benefit

Before the crisis, a number of companies were promoting telecommuting in their Employee Value Proposition, and even more will do so tomorrow. This is both a good thing, as it shows that the subject exists, and a bad thing, as it reflects a major misjudgment of the issue.

The possibility of teleworking is relegated to the status of a mere benefit, on a par with a state-of-the-art smartphone or a company car. It can be a subject for negotiation when hiring, as well as a benefit that the company grants to the employee.

Similarly, when a company introduces a telecommuting scheme, one of the first questions that arises is "who will be eligible? Unsurprisingly, it's always the same people: autonomous, experienced managers and head office staff.

When it comes to telecommuting, the company has focused on "tele", whereas what counts is work! And, for those professions for which it is of course possible, work is no longer a question of place (or even time), but of organization and state of mind.

When the time came to switch everyone to telecommuting, we realized that the question of location suddenly ceased to be an issue, and was replaced by the "real" questions:

• how to work,
• how to work together
• how to manage, etc.

The focus was no longer on where employees were, but on how, in this context, the company would continue to produce, deliver and serve its customers. This should have been the company's one and only concern from the outset.

With COVID, teleworking has gone from being a concessionary benefit to a key element of a Business Continuity Plan.

Teleworking is a way of organizing "production". A somewhat barbaric term borrowed from the industrial sector, but one which reminds us that, whatever its activity, a company "produces" something through its employees.

To continue the metaphor, there was a time when industry underwent a transformation. Instead of designing and manufacturing everything in the same place, production centers were set up all over the world, as were design offices, according to the location of expertise, and we had to reinvent ourselves in this context.

New organization, new logistics flows, new skills for engineers who had to collaborate not in an office, but across the globe, and new tools to make it all possible. To seize new opportunities, an entire production model had to be reinvented.

Telecommuting should be seen in a similar light. It opens up new opportunities, provided that we rethink the way in which all players are organized and equipped to continue producing together, but now from a distance.

Organizing activity and production requires us to take three factors into account:

• firstly, the organization of work: schedules, tools, collaboration and communication practices, processes, decision-making and reporting procedures, etc. ;

• then culture in the broadest sense: which managerial model, how is leadership exercised in a distributed organization, do we trust individuals, etc.?

• then the tools: do they enable all the tasks concerned to be carried out as easily and seamlessly as if everyone were on the same site?

Let's not forget the "people" in the broadest sense: what "hard" and "soft" skills are needed to operate in this context?

And last but not least, something that is all too often forgotten: practice and training. Organization, skills and tools are no substitute for shared practice. You can't change your organization overnight. Let me draw a parallel with fire drills.

Companies carry out one a year, which in no way means that the mechanism is sufficiently well oiled, that everyone knows how to behave and fulfill their role, especially in real-life conditions.

This is what happened in many companies: many people knew in theory what telecommuting was, but had not acquired certain reflexes or developed a shared practice of telecommuting within a team. Generally speaking, telecommuting covers a multitude of collective and individual uses: each one needs to be the subject of a shared practice, a toolkit, and employees need to be familiar with it.

As a result, telecommuting has always been seen from a purely HR perspective, even though it can involve :

• operations management,
• process and methods departments
• and has always been thought of as a matter for the "chosen few", whereas, as we have seen, it should apply to everyone.

In addition, this is one of the reasons why telecommuting has not always worked well in the past. When one person is at a distance, so is everyone else. It doesn't matter whether it's the manager who's teleworking and his team who's in the office, or vice versa, unless there's a management problem, which we'll discuss later.

On a personal note, when my company introduced telecommuting several years ago, we did so for operational reasons. When you're working across more than 20 countries, you're necessarily working remotely. From then on, we had to be efficient, regardless of the "where". And when the "where" isn't in the same place, it doesn't matter whether it's in an office or at home.

To put this in place, we first assessed and adapted our organization and tools so that being in the office was never the result of an operational constraint. The aim was to be able to operate without anyone in the office, while telling ourselves that this would never happen... but who can do more can do less.

Lastly, eligibility was extended to all employees whose job allowed it (difficult for reception or maintenance staff), but absolutely all other jobs were concerned. Even IT, thanks to a 100% cloud choice, no longer needed to be on site. Only two conditions had to be met:

• to have assimilated the corporate culture
• and key business processes.

No question of profession or status. The whole process was rounded off with softskills training.

As for training and shared practices, these were acquired over time, with 3 days of telecommuting for all and a systematic switch to "telecommuting" mode.those who wished to do so, as soon as a social movement affected public transport.

The lesson of the crisis is this:

1. Telecommuting is a way for a company to produce and satisfy its customers, not a gift to individual employees.
2. Telecommuting must be possible for all those whose jobs are "telecommutable" and all the time, even if under normal conditions the cursor can be placed in different places.

Telecommuting creates no (new) problems

By experimenting with full-scale, forced teleworking, companies have discovered the dark side of a promise that some saw only as a liberation. But before we talk about what went wrong and draw the consequences, we need to put things into context.

First of all, and especially during the first lockdown, French employees were confronted with their company's unpreparedness: not only in terms of organization and tools, but above all in terms of practice. Even when everything was in place, the system was not fully appropriate on a large scale, and the early stages necessarily showed certain "seizures".

Secondly, what French employees experienced was not telecommuting, but house arrest under health constraints. Whether in the office or remotely, work requires breathing space, and the individual needs social interaction.

But this is not telecommuting, and the assessment made of it is biased:

• when you no longer see your colleagues,
• you can't go out for a breath of fresh air after a day's work,
• when the gym is closed,
• when you only see your colleagues and no longer your friends,
• when you no longer know whether you're sleeping in the office or working in your bedroom,

Having said that, let's face it: not everything has been perfect, and even "outside COVID", companies that have implemented telecommuting have noticed some "friction".

This may come as a surprise, because at the other end of the spectrum, there are companies for whom widespread telecommuting has always worked. Most of them, like Automattic, the publisher behind the Wordpress solution, are "young" technology companies, which is a factor to take into account. But above all, they've never been to the office. Some might say they've developed "good practices" from the start, but I'd say they've never got used to the bad ones!

If we look at telecommuting as a way of organizing production, one thing is clear: when we transpose the way the office works to a remote location, all its dysfunctions are amplified and put under the spotlight. When only certain people are teleworking, they can be blamed when things go wrong. When everyone is teleworking, we realize that the problem is not individual, but systemic.

Telecommuting doesn't create new problems per se, but it does bring to the fore all the dysfunctions of the office. Distance reveals an organization's weaknesses. The proof is in the pudding: all companies that function well remotely function well in the office, but an organization that functions well in the office (or imagines it does) functions poorly remotely.

Let's take a few random examples.

Many managers were disoriented by the switch to telecommuting, and no longer knew how to do their job or embody their role. Why was this? Telecommuting imposes a results-oriented culture: we're no longer considered by our presence at work, but by the quality of the work we do and the results we achieve. This means :

• a greater sense of responsibility on the part of the employee,
• but also a new attitude on the part of the manager, who, as he or she cannot constantly control, must adopt a "helping" posture in a "servant leadership" approach, and learn to trust.

It's no surprise, then, that we saw managers suffering: information no longer necessarily circulated through anyone but them, since physical contact had disappeared in the office, they were increasingly bypassed (even by their own hierarchy) and no longer saw what their colleagues were doing. They had a choice between :

• letting go, to which they were not accustomed,
• or "over-control", which devoured their energy and stretched them and their colleagues to the limit.

But isn't this change in the manager's posture something we've been talking about for the past 10 or 20 years, but which has rarely become a reality for want of a compelling need?

Remote collaboration has also shown its limits. But do we communicate and collaborate well in the office? Certainly not! But in the office, there's always the "off": you can make an aside in the open space, take advantage of a meeting at the coffee machine to pass on a message or ask for clarification. The office provides contacts that help compensate for imperfect practices.

From a distance, you only see the imperfections. And when you consider that, once at a distance, many employees have discovered certain tools on their workstations and have had to have certain vital functions explained to them, you can see the difference between using a tool and mastering it! Do we know how to use the right tools for the job? Are we abusing email for the wrong reasons? Are we using collaborative document editing instead of emailing?

Another point: video meetings, which were becoming incessant and exhausting. Once again: do we know how to organize and run effective office meetings? No. Everyone complains about it, but deals with it. At a distance, it's obvious and amplified.

Many corporate processes have also had the hiccups. One of the main reasons has been the lack of dematerialization of some of them, particularly at HR level.

It would be incongruous in 2021 not to have paper-based processes in place, and not to have made electronic signature of documents widespread.

But then again, as long as there's physical contact, it works, however imperfectly. At a distance, everything grinds to a halt. The simple fact of not being able to get an employment contract signed electronically, or worse, a contract with a customer, has brought companies to a standstill for weeks. Let's not talk about video job interviews, or appraisal forms that only existed on paper. Delays in dematerialization caused friction, dysfunction and stress, but can we blame telecommuting for work that didn't get done?

And finally, another subject that cannot be ignored: employee malaise and the beginnings of employee disengagement.

This is due to the particular circumstances mentioned above, but is too critical to be dismissed out of hand. We can only praise the HR departments for putting out the fires, but once again, we have to wonder what the managers were doing.

In the office, the individual can take refuge in the collective. At a distance, exchanges become more operational and "efficient", and we can only observe the void left by the manager. It's abnormal that they had to be reminded, even taught, to embody this dimension of their role. In the same way, the over-solicitation of which many have rightly complained, is only proof that many disconnection charters are forgotten as soon as they are signed, and that those who should embody them in the first place are those who most blithely disregard them.

Is teleworking the problem or just the tip of the iceberg?

Let's face it: our organizations are largely dysfunctional, but unlike a factory, when this happens in an open space and involves "knowledge workers", it's not something you can see simply by walking around the offices. There's no stockpile of products in front of a machine to indicate that there's a problem somewhere, or a pile of rejects to indicate that non-quality is being produced, or that a process is inadequate.

In the office, employees spend an inordinate amount of time informally "compensating" for organizational dysfunctions, which more or less amounts to hiding the dust under the carpet. From a distance, the dust remains and the carpet has been removed.

Should we blame telecommuting for eliminating the carpet, or the organization for creating dust?

For 10 years we've been talking about the " future of work", 20 or 30 years companies have been stumbling over the deployment of collaborative tools, 40 years they've been trying to better manage "knowledge workers". What we've just experienced doesn't show us that telecommuting doesn't work, but that, for want of a compelling necessity, they have failed to transform themselves in these dimensions.

The past year has led us to make a choice between :

• deciding that telecommuting poses many problems, and deciding to restrict it as much as possible;
• say that we've been lucky enough to see all the weaknesses in the organization, IT and management finally identified and brought out into the open, and decide to remedy them.

Once again, a company that functions perfectly remotely will have no trouble getting back into the office. The reverse is not true, and 2020 has taught us that telecommuting is not always a matter of choice, but can become an obligation.

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Telecommuting is not a one-size-fits-all T-shirt

After a year of more or less successful experiments, the vast majority of companies want to review the framework they give to teleworking. For whom, for how many days a week?

Recently, I read about a company that was going to "allow its employees to telework 2 days a week". When you consider the stakes of telecommuting in terms of business continuity, you might think that the "productive" issue has been forgotten.Not to mention the attractiveness of telecommuting, which is something some people really aspire to.

It's understandable that telecommuting may not suit some people, and it should certainly not be imposed on them (which, fortunately, no one is planning to do). But for others, because of the way they work, their own qualities, their profession, what they have to do at any given time, it won't be enough.

But that's about the discomfort some people experience when working from home, or their need to meet their colleagues. But, let's remember, from the moment someone is teleworking, everyone should know how to work remotely, unless that person is excluded.

If two people telework two days a week, they may only see each other 20% of the time. At 3 days, they may never see each other. In other words, no matter what each person's aspirations are, everyone has to achieve the same level of mastery, and the "telework-optimized" organization has to apply to everyone.

But let's go a step further. A person's appetite for telecommuting is partly due to things that are specific to them, and which, by definition, must be respected. Depending on their mission and current project, a person may need to telework:

• 5 days a week for a while,
• then need and want to come back to the office 5 days a week for a while, because they need to organize more creative meetings or integrate into a new team.

An employee at ease in a team with a certain collective experience may consider spending more time telecommuting than joining a new team.

All this to say that, for the same job, there will be as many desires to telework as there will be individuals. For the same individual, depending on where they are in their professional maturity, in their career within the company, in a given project, this desire or need may vary completely over time.

An overly rigid framework that pigeon-holes individuals would benefit no-one.

For the company, teleworking is a way of organizing its production and activities. For the employee, it's also a way of life. Both are constantly evolving, and the important thing is to be able to align them so that everyone benefits.

At Spotify, a company whose mode of organization inspires businesses the world over, the telecommuting "charter" specifies :

The exact split between working at home and in the office is a decision that each employee and his or her manager make together.

This is certainly the most pragmatic way to proceed. To go the other way would be to admit that there is a problem of trust, skills or whatever, and would simply be blaming telecommuting for problems for which it is not responsible. To avoid solving them?

There's no magic formula when it comes to setting rules and limits for telecommuting. It's up to each individual to invent the life that goes with it, or the work that goes with his or her life. As long as the work gets done, and done well.