A new refrain about teleworking is emerging. Businesses would come back! Companies perhaps, employees, in the vast majority, certainly not. And what does “come back” mean? Would they like to remove it? Or would they seek to reduce it? How can we imagine for a single second a company permanently erasing teleworking from its map when almost all of them already encounter enough attractiveness problems? Removing it would bury the company in an anachronistic grave forever. So why are certain people (always the same) systematically resistant to it and taking advantage of this so-called change of heart to go back on this acquired freedom?
“Teleworking weakens social ties, the collective loses!” the brainless parrots repeat in a pack. In the rehashed pile of received opinions, in the beaten path of truisms and clichés, this trivial conjecture becomes an adage. It’s time to deal him a final blow because this idea is not right.
“Full” teleworking, as a good business phrase, is of course right for our social and professional relationships, but in the form of “hybridization” (always in the same good phrase), it in no way prevents us from maintaining the connections. Certainly, the individualistic risk increases with teleworking, but this does not prevent anyone from coming back to work for a few days in a company, or from meeting up for more informal and convivial moments. It is therefore not teleworking as such that condemns collective moments but the efforts that a hybrid organization requires and that few are ready to provide to put it in place. Teleworking is systematically invoked as a cause, a pretext for the disintegration of links, while it is above all the alibi of those who seek to hide their difficulty in organizing collective moments. It is much easier to blame a technique than to question yourself. Bad faith here consists of transforming the human difficulty into a disqualification of the system. Secondly, the social bond did not wait for teleworking to unravel in the workplace. Even the open space, this space of collaborative osmosis (sic) participated. Promiscuity, far from facilitating exchanges, most of the time gags collaborators fearing the slightest word of disturbing their closest neighbors. Finally, far from replacing the benefits of real contact, the virtual allows us to rediscover its flavor. We know it well, it is enough to lose or lack something to appreciate its value. It is the same with beings. The continual presence of each other can in the long run tarnish relationships. We appreciate our moments together all the more when we know they are occasional. We prepare meetings all the better when we know they will be punctual. In other words, teleworking, far from undermining the collective, strengthens and consolidates it! Real interactions are all the more expected, desired and effective because they are suspended and virtualized by distance.
This irrepressible desire for surveillance
Despite these arguments, if some persist in returning to teleworking, it is because it ultimately reduces the amount of surveillance, control and tracking, by replacing permanent visibility with trust. Letting employees work from where they want when they want implies letting go, an abandonment. Certain controlling psychologies are stubbornly resistant to it.
Remember that teleworking is there to best reconcile the necessities and contingencies of professional life with those of personal life. Like any balance, its implementation requires flexibility, flexibility and permanent adaptations. It is therefore understandable that companies modulate and adjust it according to circumstances. But adjusting it is one thing, coming back to it permanently is another. Like everything else, teleworking has serious disadvantages (amplifying certain inequalities, causing injustices, etc.). Like any freedom granted, it in no way exempts from liberticidal excesses. But please, let’s no longer use the false iterative argument of the collective to disqualify it. That leaders or managers who do not get used to it accept their inability to adapt to it or their irrepressible desire for surveillance.
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