December 1995: France is stopped. Three weeks of strikes Paralyze Paris and the major provincial cities. However, in some companies, thanks to the emergence of “teleservices”, the difficulties are a little less felt. In the aftermath of these historic strikes, the “Successful” supplement of L’Express of January 4, 1996 puts on the front page “The Vogue du Tétravail“And is interested in the development of remote secretarial companies that have been able to do well. At the time, if we are not yet talking about work at home, The appearance of remote work opens up new perspectives in our way of working.
The Vogue du Tétravail
“Embarrassed by the strikes? Not the least. While their bosses and their consumers engulfed in Parisian traffic jams, Muriel and Marie-Claude, installed in a clear office, in the midst of the Ardennes meadows, struck the legal mail as usual every night in express by their main customer, the mutual of the architects of France. The edge of the Argonne forest, young women did not take ten minutes to come and work in Grandpré.
The advent of teleworking on the cover of the Successful Express Successful Supplement of January 4, 1996
© / L’Express
In their deserted premises of major cities, many leaders had to dream during these three weeks of having, available, of remote skills secretaries. The formula is little known. However, it has been developing quickly since the late 1980s, thanks to the trivialization of faxes, modems and other communication tools, constantly more efficient and less expensive. Specialized companies, such as Télergos, which employs Muriel and Marie-Claude, are multiplying. According to the SIST, a young union of this new profession, teleservices today employ some 15,000 people in all regions of France. “
Upcoming upheavals
Two months after the first article devoted to teleworking, in a cover on the theme “How we work tomorrow”, L’Express projects and highlights the major changes caused by the modernization of communication systems.
“In the year 2000, more than half of the employees will use teleworking. With the drop in telecommunications prices, France will be able to export services with high added value. Think of telemedicine, remote-tensioning, factory telemaintment, all kinds of tele-fertures … Yes, companies will radically modify their establishment. See the United States: Microsoft, for example, York or in Silicon Valley, but 50 kilometers from Seattle, in the countryside.
The world of work in full mutation. Express coverage of March 14, 1996
© / L’Express
In this file, Richard de Vendeuil puts a spotlight on Finland, a pioneering country in terms of telework.
“Jukka, 31, is a teleworker. Like 8% of Finnish employees: the Home Office European record (the home office), thanks to a very competitive communications network (a million mobile phones for 5 million inhabitants). In France, they are hardly more than 2%, and again.” High-tech “quadra”, a family father with the so-called Finnish. “
The fashion of nomadic workers
At the end of 1996, home work emerged very slowly. Agnès Baumier analyzes the benefits of this great upheaval for the employer and for the employee. The first reserves emerged quickly denied by practice.
“The current development of teleworking also concerns employees of conventional companies, now authorized to carry out part of their home mission. Traditionally mobile staff – consultants, commercial or repairers of all kinds – are the first affected by the new fashion. Equipped with micro -scorders and mobile phones, these” nomadic workers “are increasingly rarely get to the office. Files?
The employer will further reduce his housing stock and, therefore, its costs. The employee will lose less hours in transport. An ideal solution to reconcile productivity and quality of life? The conditions of existence of these teleworkers make many white passes dream. But their hierarchical managers remain reserved. “If they are delivered to themselves, nothing will prevent my employees from reading the newspaper or going to the supermarket during their working hours,” said an administrative department.
Mentalities evolve slower than technique: practice proves, on the contrary, that most teleworkers devote even more time to their files. “The spoiled hours every day in traffic jams in Ile-de-France are as numerous as the hours worked in the Lyon agglomeration. If only 10% of employees worked partly at a distance, these hassles would be resolved”, ignites Christine Gauthier, secretary general of the Catral, agency for the development of time in Ile-de-France. “
2 % of French assets before the year 2000 …
At the dawn of the year 2000, the practice of remote work begins to get out of confidentiality. France is lagging against its European neighbors but more and more companies are taking the plunge, notes Véronique Yvernaul, in the Express of December 2, 1999.
“We estimate the number of teleworkers at 400,000, more than 2% of the working population. A figure that continues to increase, but which nevertheless places France among European red lanterns, far behind Finland (where telework concerns 17% of assets), the Netherlands (15%) and Germany (6%).
The development of remote work concerns all sectors and all trades. From accounting to software design, including human resources management, the choice of activities practicing remotely is wide. In addition, nothing is technically opposed to their implementation: companies are working more and more in the network, the Internet and Intranet are generalized, IT and telephone tools are constantly perfected, the price of communications drops …
“The distance between my home and my office? A staircase of five steps!” Teleworking on the front page of the Successful Express Success of December 2, 1999.
© / L’Express
This formula, which has been trampled for ten years, is experiencing a new momentum, thanks to the net revolution in France. For the moment, only a few companies have embarked on the adventure, mainly large groups or companies located on the niche of new technologies. “Teleworking still suffers from a negative connotation with employers, deplores Nicole Turbé-Suetens, president of the French Association of Teletravail and Teleactivities and Co-author of the Book Labor and Activities Remote. But its development is inevitable, because it allows companies to increase their competitiveness while improving the comfort and efficiency of their employees.”
7 % a few years later
In 2005, the figures rose that the practice of telework extends. It is not yet supervised and remains mostly informal but the momentum is launched. Valérie Lion draws up the robot portrait of the French teleworker.
“According to the Ministry of Employment, France now has 1.5 million teleworkers, or 7% of employees (5.6% in 2001). It is generally a man, qualified, executive, on permanent contracts, most often in the financial sector or business services. It makes intensive use of IT outside his business, at his home or in other places – it is then said” nomad “. to their company by computer and mobile phone, which is regularly increasing.
“The informal teleworking, on a case -by -case basis, on the day by day, according to needs, seems to develop much faster than the formal telework, organized in a framework fixed beforehand, under collective agreements”, underlines Patricia Vendramin, sociologist, researcher at the University of Namur. It then becomes more an additional time than a substitution time: the schedules are more flexible, but the work on weekends or even the night is much more frequent. “
2020: the more choice
It will take a global health crisis for the corporate world to adopt teleworking. March 17, 2020, day 1 of confinement in FranceAgnès Laurent describes this forced tilting in her column devoted to daily life in the time of confinement. Between 2019 and 2023, the share of employees practicing telework at least occasionally will drop from 9 % to 26 % according to Dares.
“From now on, our lives in times of” social distancing “have a completely different look. The world is divided into two: those who can do telework and those who have any choice than partial unemployment. The former learn to be called, to share online documents, to make meetings in visio. Mysterious words make their appearance,” VPN “,” Hangouts “,” Slack “… We do not always know the utility, we perceive the importance to the tone used to talk about it, the most curious go to check on the internet what they serve. Of course, digital telework knows some failures. Insufficient external access, microphones/ cameras/ applications that stubbornly refuse to walk at the time of the meeting, the inaccessible documents because recorded in a computer hard drive (fixed and in the preference office) and not in a cloud – A “cloud” for purists. The youngest look up to the sky when they hear the questions of the technophobes, but Cahin-Caha, the company turns, the job is done.
The strikes last December allowed Ile -de -France workers to take a step ahead in terms of telework – almost half of them have tried it. And to companies to “test” their systems before the end of the past few days. Since then, aware of their shortcomings, some have accelerated the training of their employees to remote collaborative work tools. “