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Since the health crisis, teleworking has emerged as a solution to more easily realize your travel desires. We are accustomed to imagining employees who take the plunge working on a heavenly beach, devoting only a few hours to their employee tasks… The reality would in fact be less exotic, according to Le Routard.
An office with your feet in the sand?
A cloudless blue sky in perfect harmony with the same shade that enhances the sea in front of which you have set up… your office. With this strip of blond sand, it’s true that the spot is ideal for teleworking. At the start of the health crisis, we all heard about these employees who took to their heels to combine work and travel, in countries where borders were still opening, becoming over time a way of working at full part.
If there are constraints to working on the other side of the world such as time difference, this project is in theory not a utopia insofar as no legal text prohibits employees from carrying out their tasks from there. ‘foreign, indicates the webzine Culture RH, specializing in human resources. For its part, the Labor Code gives no indication on this subject.
Not to be confused with a vacation
There is therefore every reason to take shortcuts to imagine that a teleworker who connects 10,000 km from his office spends more time basking in the pill than working on the latest report he must submit to his boss. … Nothing is actually so certain.
The Backpacker’s Guide surveyed its readers who experimented with this escape formula only to realize that teleworkers generally combined their travel plans with the constraints of their position. In this case, 31% of those questioned devoted half of their stay to their work while 10% dedicated it all. At the same time, 59% of them work less than 50% of the time.
Not really adventurers…
Another preconceived idea brushed aside by Le Routard: teleworkers do not necessarily set up their office on a beach lined with coconut trees. In line with the global remote work index published a few days ago to designate the countries most conducive to remote work, Europe is the destination favored by backpackers, up to 50%, compared to 43% who attempted the adventure to more distant destinations. In a majority of cases (68%), teleworkers go to a hotel, otherwise they stay with friends (58%).
In short, we are far from the exotic image of an employee who wanders around, computer under arm, carrying out his tasks in basic conditions. However, we cannot ignore this new way of working as an opportunity to travel more easily. 24% of backpackers say they take advantage of it regularly compared to 26% who use this option sometimes.
Teleworking abroad remains marginal
However, we should not imagine this project, which may leave more than one employee dreaming, as a trend in which a large number of employees take part. Let us first point out that this Routard study is based on a sample of 230 travelers who tested this mode of escape. Let us also recall the official figures for teleworking in France. According to the last INSEE report On this subject, which applies to the year 2021 when the health crisis was still shaking up working habits, only one in five employees teleworked on average every week, mainly executives. For his part, the president of the Tour Operator’s Union (SETO) indicated this trend of teleworking abroad “as an epiphenomenon”, in the context of an interview he gave us.