Telework and performance: rethinking the employee experience to serve commitment and the collective

The Coronavirus health crisis, far from being the last of us, is tending to impose telework in the French corporate landscape in a sustainable way. Before the containment, the legislation and the executive power were already encouraging it more and more and companies were gradually getting into it. However, were we sufficiently prepared for what lay ahead?

During the crisis, about 5 million people (Source: Ministry of Labour, May 2020), or 18% of the 28 million people who would have worked in home-based confinement. The media have widely reported the exceptional and unprecedented nature of these figures and the difficulties encountered by teleworkers on a daily basis.

Let's be realistic: INSEE estimated in 2019 that only 3% of the working population was teleworking at least one day a week. Several months after the end of the confinement, according to a very recent Adoxa survey (*), 1 out of 7 French people would still be teleworking in September 2020. And revealing fact: only 29% of the French people questioned said they wanted to telework more, whereas in April 2020, 55% of the workers who had teleworked during the confinement expressed the wish to telework more once the confinement was over.

Questions then arise: How should the subject of telework be approached in the current period? How to make telework a sustainable performance lever for the company as well as a vector of quality of life for employees? How can telework be implemented and managed on a daily basis so that it can be a first step towards more global transformations of the company? How can we rethink the employee experience by fully integrating telework? And how can we preserve employee commitment, the keystone of the company's collective project, despite distance?

It is with great pleasure that we have welcomed Maxime Robache, author of Mettre en place & manager le télétravail at Eyrolles Editions, so that he can provide us with concrete and immediately applicable answers in our organisations in order to be "efficient together and at a distance" on Wednesday 2 December at 9.30 am for the opening keynote of the Digital Workplace Days!

Maxime Robache is an entrepreneur, consultant and author. The fields of intervention that are close to his heart are Telework, as a collective organisation mode at the service of performance and quality of life, collective intelligence as a new social order in the company and Agile methods as a vector of efficiency and adequacy to the users' needs.

(*) Survey carried out from 7 to 11 September 2020 with a sample of 3,000 people, representative of the French population aged over 18 years, questioned by internet. https://www.lefigaro.fr/societes/covid-19-1-francais-sur-7-en-teletravail-en-septembre-20201008