Deterioration of interactions with their teams, feeling of being monitored and controlling colleagues, longer working hours… Teleworking has become, in a few years, hell for managers in companies. In a study by the French Confederation of Management and Executives (CFE CGC), published this Wednesday, April 24, those concerned cite several negative consequences of this mode of work, largely democratized in companies since the Covid-19 pandemic. Sometimes serious consequences: 71% of managers say they are subject to anxiety, partly for these reasons.
If more than half of them indicate that they work on average two days per week, the survey highlights that managers have “more difficulty than their colleagues in using their teleworking days”. For good reason: they tend, in particular, to adapt to their teams’ teleworking days rather than designing their own schedule, and spend more time in the office in order to see all their colleagues, who are not not all there on the same days.
Less human collaboration
Asked about the difficulties that would make them reduce, or even refuse, teleworking, managers point to mainly human factors. The breakdown of interactions with their colleagues is cited in particular by 14% of them. These disadvantages themselves sometimes lead to problems in making oneself understood at a distance as well as in uncovering subtle problems: professional or personal difficulties of colleagues, tensions, etc.
Thus, more than a quarter of the study’s respondents consider that teleworking creates tensions in the company, for reasons such as the inequality between employees who can benefit from the system and those who cannot (34%). , difficulties working with colleagues from other departments (21%) and between colleagues on the same team (19%). Around 4 out of 10 managers also consider that they have not been trained to lead their team in the context of remote work.
Teleworking, however, presents some advantages for the managers interviewed: “It appears that teleworking days allow time for concentration with better management and filtering of external requests in order to devote oneself to substantive tasks”, notes the CFE CGC. Even if many of them still express suffering from “overload” in the context of remote work. In contrast, “face-to-face days appear to be an effective way of maintaining team cohesion, fostering collective emulation and carrying out managerial actions,” specifies the study.
Difficulty disconnecting
Another pressure factor felt by the supervisory teams: the difficulty in truly disconnecting and allowing their teams to disconnect, which results in particular in a greater amplitude of working hours cited by 12% of them. If for their part “managers try to be exemplary regarding this subject for their teams”, “the constant access to e-mails and their presence on online tools (Teams in particular) make disconnection difficult”, notes the study.
Even if they “do not report any monitoring practice or strategy officially implemented in their organizations”, 14% of the managers questioned nevertheless note a feeling of implicit surveillance and control, possible thanks to professional messaging tools like Teams, which indicate whether employees are connected or not. Many of them also report evaluating the success of their team through measurable indicators, such as the number of files processed per day by their team.
Other, more practical criteria impact the working conditions of the managers interviewed. 20% report experiencing a poor Internet connection. However, access to company offices is becoming more and more difficult, and less and less comfortable for certain employees, whether managers or not. The “flex office”, translation into the physical world of the generalization of teleworking which has pushed companies to reduce the number of square meters of office space and to eliminate assigned offices per employee, in order to reduce the cost of rent, is collectively rejected by 78% of managers.