Teleworking: revealing the problems in your organisation

It's been a year since many companies and employees discovered teleworking and, for others, drastically increased the intensity of a practice they thought they were familiar with.

One year is enough time to get some feedback, especially as the question arises of determining a more permanent framework for this practice.

But to come up with the right answers, we still need to ask the right questions, taking the sting out of a subject that is still hot and with which it is not yet possible to have a 'calm' relationship. And to do that, we need to take teleworking for what it is, far from the idealised or catastrophic image that many people have of it.

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Teleworking is a way of organising production, not a benefit

Before the crisis, a number of companies were promoting teleworking as part of their Employee Value Proposition, and even more will do so in the future. This is both a good thing, because it shows that the subject exists, and a bad thing, because it reflects a major misjudgement of the issue.

The possibility of teleworking is thus relegated to the status of a mere benefit, on a par with a state-of-the-art smartphone or a company car. It can be a subject of negotiation in recruitment, as well as a benefit that the company grants to the employee.

Similarly, when a company introduces a teleworking scheme, one of the first questions that arises is "who will be eligible? Unsurprisingly, it's always the same people: autonomous, experienced managers and head office staff.

When it comes to teleworking, the company has focused on the "tele", whereas what counts is the work! And for those professions where it is possible, of course, work is no longer a question of location (or even time), but of organisation and mindset.

When the time came to switch everyone to teleworking, we realised that the question of location suddenly ceased to be an issue, and was replaced by the 'real' issues:

• how to work,
• how to work together
• how to manage, etc.

The focus was no longer on where the employees were, but on how, in this context, the company was going to continue to produce, to 'deliver', to serve its customers. This should have been the company's one and only concern from the outset.

With COVID, teleworking has gone from being a benefit to be granted to a key element of a Business Continuity Plan.

Teleworking is a way of organising 'production'. A somewhat barbaric term borrowed from the industrial sector, but one that reminds us that whatever its activity, a company 'produces' something through its employees.

To continue the metaphor, there was a time when industry underwent a transformation. Instead of designing and manufacturing everything in the same place, production centres were set up around the world, as were design offices, depending on where the expertise was located, and we had to reinvent ourselves in this context.

New organisation, new logistics flows, new skills for engineers who no longer had to work in an office, but across the world, and new tools to make it all possible. To seize new opportunities, an entire production model has had to be reinvented.

Teleworking should be seen in a similar light. It opens up new opportunities, provided that we review the way in which all the players are organised and equipped to continue to produce together, but now from a distance.

Organising activity and production requires three factors to be taken into account:

• firstly, the organisation of work: schedules, tools, collaboration and communication practices, processes, decision-making and reporting procedures, etc. ;

• then a culture in the broadest sense: what is the managerial model, how is leadership exercised in a distributed organisation, is there trust in individuals, etc.?

• then the tools: do they enable all the tasks concerned to be carried out as simply and seamlessly as if everyone were on the same site?

Let's not forget the "people" in the broadest sense: what "hard" and "soft" skills are needed to operate in this context?

And finally, something that is all too often forgotten: practice and training. Organisation, skills and tools are no substitute for shared practice. You can't change your organisation overnight. Let me draw a parallel with fire drills.

Companies do one a year, which in no way means that the mechanism is sufficiently well oiled, that everyone knows how to behave and fulfil their role, especially in real-life conditions.

This is what happened in many companies: many people knew in theory what teleworking was, but had not acquired certain reflexes or developed a shared practice of teleworking within a team. Generally speaking, teleworking covers a multitude of collective and individual uses: each one needs to be the subject of a shared practice, tools and employees need to be used to it.

Teleworking has therefore always been seen from a purely HR perspective, even though it can involve :

• Operations management
• the process and methods department
• and has been designed to concern 'elected representatives', whereas, as we have seen, it should apply to everyone.

This is also one of the reasons why teleworking has not always worked well in the past. When one person is at a distance, so is everyone else. It doesn't matter whether it's the manager who's teleworking and his team who's in the office, or vice versa, unless there's a management problem, which we'll talk about later.

Personally, when my company introduced teleworking several years ago, we did so for operational reasons. When you're working across more than 20 countries, you're necessarily working remotely. From that point on, we had to be efficient, regardless of the 'where'. And when the 'where' isn't in the same place, it doesn't matter whether it's in an office or at home.

To put this in place, we first assessed and adapted our organisation and tools so that being in the office was never the result of an operational constraint. The aim was to be able to operate without anyone in the office, while telling ourselves that this would never happen... but that less is more.

Lastly, all employees whose job allowed them to do so were eligible (difficult for reception or maintenance staff), but absolutely all other jobs were concerned. Even IT, thanks to a 100% cloud solution, no longer needed to be on site. Only two conditions had to be met:

• to have assimilated the corporate culture
• and the key processes of your business.

There was no question of profession or status. All of this was complemented by softskills training.

As for training and shared practices, these were acquired over time, with 3 days of teleworking for everyone and a systematic switch to "teleworking" mode.mode for those who wanted it, as soon as a social movement affected public transport.

The lesson of the crisis is this:

1. Teleworking is a way for a company to produce and satisfy its customers, not a gift to individual employees.
2. Teleworking must be possible for everyone whose job is "teleworkable" and all the time, even if under normal conditions the cursor can be placed in different places.

Teleworking creates no (new) problems

By experimenting with total and forced teleworking, companies have discovered the dark side of a promise that some saw only as a liberation. But before we talk about what went wrong and draw the consequences, we need to put things into context.

First of all, and especially during the first confinement, the French employees were confronted with their company's unpreparedness: not only in terms of organisation and tools, but above all in terms of practice. Even when everything was in place, the system was not fully appropriate on a large scale, and the early stages necessarily showed some "seizures".

Secondly, what French employees experienced was not teleworking, but house arrest under health constraints. Whether in the office or remotely, work requires breathing space, and individuals need social interaction.

But this is not teleworking, and the assessment made of it is biased:

• when you no longer see your colleagues
• you can't go out for a breath of fresh air after a day's work,
• when the gym is closed,
• when you only see your colleagues and no longer your friends,
• when you no longer know whether you're sleeping in the office or working in your bedroom,

Having said that, let's face it: not everything has been perfect, and even 'outside COVID', companies that have implemented teleworking have noticed some 'friction'.

This may come as a surprise, because at the other end of the spectrum, there are companies for whom widespread teleworking has always worked. Most of them, like Automattic, the publisher behind the Wordpress solution, are 'young' technology companies, which is a factor to be taken into account. Above all, they have never worked in an office. Some might say that they've developed 'good practices' from the start, but I'd say they've never got used to the bad ones!

If we look at teleworking as a way of organising production, one thing is clear: when the way the office works is transposed to a remote location, all the dysfunctions are amplified and put under the spotlight. When only certain people are teleworking, they can be blamed when things go wrong. When everyone is teleworking, we realise that the problem is not individual, but systemic.

Teleworking doesn't create new problems in itself, but it does highlight all the dysfunctions in the office. Distance reveals an organisation's weaknesses. The proof is in the pudding: all companies that function well remotely function well in the office, but an organisation that functions well in the office (or imagines it does) functions poorly remotely.

Let's take a few random examples.

Many managers were disorientated by the move to teleworking and no longer knew how to do their job or embody their role. Why was this? Teleworking imposes a results-oriented culture: we are no longer considered by our presence at work, but by the quality of the work we do and the results we achieve. This means :

• a greater sense of responsibility on the part of the employee
• but also a new attitude on the part of the manager who, because he or she cannot always control, has to adopt the attitude of "helper" in a "servant leadership" approach and learn to trust.

It's no surprise, then, that we saw managers suffering: information was no longer necessarily circulated through them alone, given that physical contact had disappeared in the office, they were increasingly bypassed (even by their own hierarchy) and could no longer see what their colleagues were doing. They had a choice between :

• letting go, to which they were not accustomed,
• or 'over-control', which devoured their energy and stretched them and their staff to the limit.

But isn't this change in managerial posture something we've been talking about for the last 10 or 20 years, but which has rarely become a reality for want of a compelling need?

Remote collaboration has also shown its limits. But do we communicate and collaborate well in the office? Certainly not! But in the office, there's always the "off": you can take a break in the open space, take advantage of a meeting at the coffee machine to pass on a message or ask for clarification. The office provides contacts that help compensate for imperfect practices.

From a distance, you only see the imperfections. And when you consider that, once they've worked remotely, many employees have discovered certain tools at their workstation and have had to have certain vital functions explained to them, you can see the difference between using a tool and mastering it! Do we know how to use the right tools for the job? Are we abusing email for the wrong reasons? Are we using collaborative document editing instead of sending them to each other by email?

Another point: video meetings, which were becoming incessant and exhausting. Once again: do we know how to organise and run effective meetings in the office? No. Everyone complains about it, but deals with it. From a distance, the effect is obvious and amplified.

Many business processes have also had the hiccups. One of the main reasons for this has been the lack of paperless processes, particularly in HR.

It would be incongruous in 2021 to have processes that are wholly or partly based on paper, and not to have made electronic signature of documents widespread.

But, once again, as long as there is physical contact, it works, even if imperfectly. At a distance, everything stops. The simple fact of not being able to get an employment contract signed electronically, or worse, a contract with a client, has brought businesses to a standstill for weeks. Let's not talk about video job interviews or appraisal forms that only existed on paper. Delays in dematerialisation have caused friction, dysfunction and stress, but can we blame teleworking for work that hasn't been done?

And finally, another subject that cannot be ignored: employee unease and the beginnings of employee disengagement.

This is due to the particular circumstances mentioned above, but it is too critical to be dismissed out of hand. We can only praise the HR departments for putting out the fires, but once again, we have to wonder what the managers were doing.

In the office, the individual can take refuge in the collective. At a distance, exchanges become more operational and 'efficient', and we can only observe the void left by the manager. It is abnormal that they have had to be reminded, or even taught, to embody this dimension of their role. In the same way, the over-solicitation of which many have rightly complained is simply proof that many charters on disconnection are forgotten as soon as they are signed, and that those who should embody them in the first place are those who most blithely disregard them.

Is teleworking the problem or just the tip of the iceberg?

Let's face it: our organisations are largely dysfunctional, but unlike in a factory, when this happens in an open space and involves 'knowledge workers', you can't see it simply by walking around the offices. There is no stock of products in front of a machine to indicate that there is a problem somewhere, or a pile of rejects to indicate that non-quality is being produced, or that a process is unsuitable.

In the office, employees spend an incredible amount of time informally 'compensating' for the organisation's dysfunctions, which is more or less the same as hiding the dust under the carpet. From a distance, the dust remains and the carpet has been pulled out.

Should we blame teleworking for eliminating the carpet, or the organisation for creating dust?

For 10 years we've been talking about the " future of work", for 20 or 30 years companies have been stumbling over the deployment of collaborative tools, and for 40 years they've been trying to improve the management of "knowledge workers". What we've just experienced doesn't show us that teleworking doesn't work, but that because it's not absolutely necessary, companies have failed to transform themselves in these areas.

The year that has just gone by means that we have to make a choice between :

• deciding that teleworking poses many problems and deciding to restrict it as much as possible ;
• say that we have been lucky enough to see all the weaknesses in the organisation, IT and management finally identified and brought out into the open, and decide to do something about them.

Once again, a company that operates perfectly remotely will have no trouble getting back to the office. The reverse is not true, and 2020 has taught us that teleworking is not always a matter of choice, but can become an obligation.

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Teleworking is not a one-size-fits-all T-shirt

After a year of more or less successful experiments, the vast majority of companies want to review the framework they provide for teleworking. For whom, for how many days a week?

I recently read about a company that was going to "allow its employees to telework 2 days a week". When you see what's at stake in teleworking in terms of business continuity, you might think that the 'productive' issue has been forgotten.Not to mention the attractiveness of teleworking, which is what some people really want.

It's understandable that some people don't want to telework, and it should certainly not be imposed on them (which, fortunately, no one is planning to do). But for others, because of the way they work, their own qualities, their job, what they have to do at any given time, it won't be enough.

But this is about the discomfort that some people experience when working from home, or their need to meet their colleagues. But, let's remember, from the moment someone is teleworking, everyone should know how to work remotely, unless that person is excluded.

If two people telework two days a week, they may only see each other 20% of the time. At 3 days, they may never see each other. In other words, whatever the aspirations of each person, everyone must achieve the same level of mastery, and the organisation "optimised for teleworking" must apply to everyone.

But let's go further. A person's appetite for teleworking is partly due to things that are specific to them and that, by definition, must be respected. Depending on their mission, their current project, people may need to telework:

• 5 days a week for a while,
• then need and want to come back to the office 5 days a week for a period because they need to organise more creative meetings or integrate into a new team.

An employee who is comfortable in a team with a certain amount of collective experience might consider spending more time teleworking than if he or she were joining a new team.

All this to say that for the same job, there will be as much desire to telework as there will be individuals. For the same individual, depending on where they are in their professional maturity, in their career in the company, in a given project, this desire or need may vary completely over time.

An overly rigid framework that fits individuals into boxes would benefit no-one.

For the company, teleworking is a way of organising its production and activities. For the employee, it is also a way of life. Both are constantly evolving, and the important thing is to be able to align them so that everyone benefits.

At Spotify, a company whose organisational model inspires businesses all over the world, the teleworking 'charter' states:

The exact split between working at home and in the office is a decision that each employee and their manager take together.

This is certainly the most pragmatic way of proceeding. To go the other way is to admit that there is a problem of trust, skills, or whatever, and would simply blame teleworking for problems for which it is not responsible. To avoid solving them?

There is no magic formula when it comes to setting rules and limits to teleworking. It's up to each individual to invent the life that goes with it, or the work that goes with their life. As long as the work gets done, and done well.