This is a revolt at a level rarely seen in Europe. While in the United States, where teleworking has developed and above all been maintained at much higher levels than in Europe, the famous “return to the office” often crystallizes all the tensions between management and employees, this dynamic seems now spreading well across the Atlantic.
The latest proof comes from the German-based company SAP, the main European software designer. At the start of the year, at the initiative of its CEO Christian Klein, the company announced to its employees a new directive limiting teleworking and requiring their employees to be present on site at least three days a week. “I don’t really believe that a videoconferencing platform can make it possible to understand our culture, to train and to give ourselves the means to do our job as best as possible,” Christian Klein also insisted when presenting the results. financial services of SAP.
“We moved to where the cost of living was lower”
It’s an understatement to say that the announcement went down poorly with employees. The works council very quickly displayed its reservations in the face of an about-face deemed “unreasonable”, after having recently been assured that there would be no turning back on this issue of remote working. But as revealed the economic newspaper Bloomberg, it is now an internal letter, signed by nearly 5,000 employees in less than two weeks, which openly denounces this choice imposed by management and even threatens to leave the company rather than having to comply with these new requirements. “We feel betrayed by a company that, until recently, encouraged us to work from home. Only to then ask us to radically change direction,” reads the letter seen by Bloomberg.
Employees also highlight the life changes made by many of them, which this turnaround hits in mid-air. “We have had to learn to adapt to the absence of significant salary increases over the years,” criticizes the works council in the letter, which goes on to explain that “to compensate, we took advantage of the possibility of working remotely and we moved to where the cost of living was lower, away from the more expensive metropolises.
Finally, employees warn against an attrition strategy hidden behind this big return to the office. Indeed, just a few weeks after announcing this new limitation on teleworking, the company SAP announced that it was going to carry out a restructuring which would affect up to 8,000 employees, notably justified by the contributions made possible by artificial intelligence. . Enough to make the employees who signed the letter see a way of getting rid of some of them refusing to comply with the new rules. They also warn management: if the new requirement is designed as a “zero-cost staff reduction strategy”, it will only drive away talented employees.
An implausible revolt in France?
IT giant SAP is not the first company affected by significant tensions over greater regulation of teleworking. To find a revolt of this magnitude, we must surely go back to last June, in the United States, where employees of the insurer Farmers Group led the revolt after the management’s decision to reimpose a minimum of face-to-face attendance. Last June, several hundred Amazon employees also demonstrated in front of the Seattle headquarters against the new policy requiring three days a week on site.
Enough to imagine a future spread in France? This still remains much more improbable. And in particular because these complaints from employees mainly concern companies where complete teleworking is practiced, better known for its anglicism.full remote“. However, this organization remains much weaker today in France than in other developed countries. Several opinion surveys have shown that the French are among the most attached to face-to-face work: one of them, carried out by the real estate consultancy firm JLL, had shown that the French went to the office on average 3.5 days per week, compared to 3.1 in the world; another, this time led by Ernst & Young Reimagined, had as It showed that only 13% of French tertiary sector employees would like to work completely remotely, compared to 34% of all workers surveyed worldwide.
But this does not prevent the emergence of tensions between employees and managers. While many companies are currently in the process of renegotiating the collective agreements on teleworking signed during the Covid crisis, and more and more influential business leaders no longer hesitate to assert their reservations too widely. taken by remote work, it is impossible to fully assert that France is fully protected from such a revolt.