Summer 2020. Covid has brought the whole world to a standstill, and teleworking has become widely accepted in companies. During this period, almost half of workers in the European Union used it: 34% worked exclusively from home, 14% alternated with days in person. Since then, this hybrid configuration has become widespread, affecting 18% of European employees in spring 2022, according to Eurofound. “A number of studies and surveys show that most people are not ready to give up teleworking: this is undoubtedly because, according to them, the cost-benefit ratio is in favor of this new way of working,” explains Emilie. Vayre, professor of occupational psychology at Lumière-Lyon II University. It must be said that the advantages would be numerous: increased productivity, reduced stress or even better balance between professional and personal life. However, “no consensus exists on the subject”, and “the research carried out on the subject indicates everything and its opposite”, recalls Marc-Eric Bobillier-Chaumon, professor and chair of occupational psychology at Cnam.
Firstly, on productivity, the effects of teleworking seem mixed. In 2015, Stanford researchers conducted a study of nine months with 16,000 employees of a call center of a Chinese company, to measure their performance. Result: among those working from home, the number of calls per minute increased by 13%, due to a work environment considered “calmer”, where concentration was easier. Conversely, a study carried out during Covid on 10,000 professionals from an IT services company concluded that there was a drop in productivity linked to teleworking of 8 to 19%, due to coordination difficulties and a greater number of meetings. “Before the pandemic, teleworking was a ‘preserved’ time, this day of the week with fewer exchanges and specifically adapted tasks, comments Laurent Taskin, professor of management at the Louvain School of Management. today widespread, with two days per week on average, and the employee has greater individual freedom in the organization of ‘his’ teleworking Finally, these days have become identical to those spent in the office, with their share of. interruptions, meetings and calls, which alters the possible gain in productivity”, maintains the researcher.
For her part, Emilie Vayre points out the limits of these studies, “for which the productivity measures are not identical”. “In certain sectors, what is produced is not easily quantifiable, and the quantity says nothing about the quality of the service provided,” she observes. Other elements to take into account are the frequency and duration of teleworking days. In 2020, a Japanese study showed that when the working day from home was too long, productivity dropped. One year later, three researchers also highlighted that beyond two days of teleworking per week, employee performance decreased, due to a reduction in exchanges between colleagues, conducive to the dissemination of knowledge. “Co-presence remains essential for all activities that involve a search for creativity and collaboration, as well as for training, management of new recruits and integration into a collective. There is a balance to be found on the type of activities and the number of days that can be teleworked, which largely depends on the context and the objectives to be achieved”, explains Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, researcher at the CNRS.
The effects of “metawork”
Regarding well-being, the observation is also nuanced. In a survey published in 2023 by the OECD Global Productivity Forum covering employees from 25 countries, 74% of them say they have had an overall positive teleworking experience during the Covid pandemic, “the savings in cost and time made on home-work travel [étant] perceived as the crucial advantage” by the majority of respondents. In a review of the literature carried out the same year, the National Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health Safety (ANSES) supports: “Certain studies point to a high level of satisfaction among teleworkers […] which would result from an overall improvement in the quality of life due to a reduction in the time spent traveling” and “an improvement in the quality of family and social relationships, thanks, in particular, to a better balance between private and professional life “. However, in support of other studies, the report further emphasizes that teleworking can also “blur the boundaries between these two spheres of life”, with employees declaring to experience “greater pressure or even an invasion when they work from home.
Marc-Eric Bobillier-Chaumon also noticed this pressure during a study carried out for a large multinational. “For certain employees, teleworking could generate forms of stress associated with greater work intensity and psychosocial risks, such as saved travel time but turned into additional working time, invisibility of real work and an isolation from the collective”, lists the professor. According to him, another notion is crucial: that of “metawork”, understood as the effort made by the employee to “bring visibility” to his own work. “This task is done instinctively in the office, through a shared awareness of what others are doing: we hear a call, we see a file handled by a colleague. On the other hand, remotely and at home, the teleworker no longer has anything “He must then explain, verbalize everything he does, which can increase the psychological load of his tasks”, explains Marc-Eric Bobillier-Chaumon.
And researcher Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte concludes: “If teleworking is not thought of in a balanced way or integrated into a real organizational project, the collective dynamic risks being broken, and the meaning of work too.”
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