Remote working: overcoming preconceptions for the best of both worlds

Stunned by the force of the pan­dem­ic and forced to adopt remote work­ing in a hur­ry, com­pa­nies have respond­ed to the most press­ing needs. Remote work­ing was imposed with­out any pri­or nego­ti­a­tion, dis­cus­sion, or eval­u­a­tion of the rules. Two years after the start of the pan­dem­ic, a large pro­por­tion of employ­ees have acquired a taste for remote work­ing, to the point where some have not set foot in their work­place for two years and have no inten­tion of return­ing to 100% onsite work­ing. Faced with short­ages in many sec­tors of activ­i­ty and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a “great res­ig­na­tion”, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of “full remote” work­ing has become one of the most attrac­tive sell­ing points for com­pa­nies and recruiters.

Tomor­row will look very dif­fer­ent from yesterday

A study by Qualtrics indi­cates that 35% of employ­ees would change employ­er if their boss forced them to return to the office full-time. In France, accord­ing to a Hub­Spot study, 14% admit that they would rather go to the den­tist than return to the office five days a week. That said, most employ­ees tend to aspire to a hybrid form of work and believe they are just as suc­cess­ful as if they were in the office full time. They claim to have found a bet­ter bal­ance between work and per­son­al life.

These devel­op­ments pose some real organ­i­sa­tion­al and man­age­ment chal­lenges. How can team spir­it be rekin­dled when team mem­bers have nev­er seen each oth­er “in real life?” Are per­for­mance and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty lev­els the same for remote and face-to-face work? Should the com­pa­ny retain as many offices as before? Above all, what is the role of the man­ag­er and are exist­ing man­agers ready to take on this new role?

Accord­ing to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, near­ly one in two French man­agers (48%) feel that their senior man­age­ment team is out of step with employ­ees’ expec­ta­tions. As for exec­u­tives, 52% fear that pro­duc­tiv­i­ty has been affect­ed by the switch to remote or hybrid work­ing, where­as 81% of their employ­ees con­sid­er them­selves to be just as pro­duc­tive or even more so.

The fact remains that social ties suf­fer from remote work­ing. For half of French man­agers (48%), this is the main chal­lenge they will have to face, whether the work is hybrid or remote. Suzy Canivenc, a doc­tor in infor­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion sci­ences and a researcher at the “Future of Indus­try and Work” (FIT) chair at Mines Paris­Tech, attempts to answer some of these questions.

In your research, you say that phys­i­cal prox­im­i­ty does not guar­an­tee social ties and that coop­er­a­tion at a dis­tance is def­i­nite­ly pos­si­ble. So, can we imag­ine per­ma­nent remote working?

Suzy Canivenc. We must dis­tin­guish between phys­i­cal prox­im­i­ty and rela­tion­al prox­im­i­ty: it is not because we are phys­i­cal­ly close that we will be emo­tion­al­ly close. A neigh­bour on the next floor or in the office who is con­sid­ered to be a ter­ri­ble per­son is often a good exam­ple of this! The social bond doesn’t just arise from being in the same place; it is pri­mar­i­ly nour­ished by a com­mon iden­ti­ty and shared ref­er­ences at the social and cog­ni­tive lev­el, sim­i­lar work habits, com­mon inter­ests and goals, for example.

How­ev­er, this does not mean that per­ma­nent remote work­ing, also called “full remote”, is nec­es­sar­i­ly the way for­ward. Some com­pa­nies prac­tice it, some­times since they were estab­lished, but most com­pa­nies are mov­ing towards a hybrid model.

Could hybrid work be the solution?

Dur­ing this pan­dem­ic, we were able to exper­i­ment with remote work­ing in an unprece­dent­ed way, even if it was under less-than-ide­al con­di­tions, since it was imposed 100% at home in an anx­i­ety-induc­ing con­text marked by mul­ti­ple restric­tions. In addi­tion to the sav­ings on trans­port time and a bet­ter work-life bal­ance, employ­ees who had long been refused this option par­tic­u­lar­ly appre­ci­at­ed the peace and qui­et they enjoyed when their home and accom­mo­da­tion allowed it. Remote work­ing thus proved con­ducive to indi­vid­ual tasks of deep con­cen­tra­tion. How­ev­er, they also dis­cov­ered its dis­ad­van­tages, notably the work over­load and the poros­i­ty between pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al life.

Remote work­ing is bet­ter suit­ed to man­age­ment based on trust and con­trol of results rather than on mis­trust and micro­man­age­ment of tasks. 

After a while, they also missed see­ing their col­leagues and chat­ting with them at the cof­fee machine, a rit­u­al that breaks up the monot­o­ny of work, strength­ens social ties, but also nur­tures a sense of serendip­i­ty through spon­ta­neous exchanges of infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge, so nec­es­sary for the smooth run­ning of companies.

Hybrid work there­fore aims to rec­on­cile these two aspects. The mod­el is not new when one thinks of all those who were already work­ing at clients’ premis­es, on the road or tak­ing work home before the health cri­sis. How­ev­er, when deployed on a large scale, it brings with it new organ­i­sa­tion­al and man­age­r­i­al challenges.

What changes does this total or hybrid remote work­ing entail in terms of work organ­i­sa­tion and management?

Remote work­ing is bet­ter suit­ed to man­age­ment based on trust and con­trol of results rather than on mis­trust and micro­man­age­ment of tasks. As far as the social con­nec­tion is con­cerned, it is nec­es­sary to invent new rit­u­als which allow emo­tion­al close­ness to be nur­tured through reg­u­lar con­tact, whether this be phys­i­cal or vir­tu­al. It is impor­tant that these exchanges do not focus sole­ly on pro­fes­sion­al activ­i­ties and short-term objec­tives in order to fos­ter the sense of shared iden­ti­ty and ref­er­ences I men­tioned earlier.

How­ev­er, it must be stressed that remote work­ing in itself does not nec­es­sar­i­ly lead to these changes. It is per­fect­ly pos­si­ble to “micro-man­age” from a dis­tance, espe­cial­ly as dig­i­tal tools can be used to mon­i­tor employ­ees remote­ly, check con­nec­tion times or mouse move­ments, and force them into a form of dig­i­tal pre­sen­teeism (inces­sant mes­sages, video tun­nels, etc.). Dur­ing the cri­sis, some even went so far as to mon­i­tor their employ­ees via webcam.

You talk about “remote dig­i­tal socia­bil­i­ty”. What does this mean?

It is pre­cise­ly the abil­i­ty to nur­ture social con­nec­tions through dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools, as the younger gen­er­a­tions, born with these tools in their hands, do. In my opin­ion, com­pa­nies have not yet ful­ly grasped this poten­tial. Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, they often sim­ply trans­ferred on-site work­ing prac­tices to the vir­tu­al world, replac­ing phys­i­cal meet­ings with video con­fer­enc­ing. How­ev­er, this tech­ni­cal sys­tem has the dis­ad­van­tage of caus­ing a high lev­el of fatigue, which we are only begin­ning to under­stand. It also has the effect of hyper-for­mal­is­ing exchanges. Video, which is the tool that has devel­oped the most dur­ing the cri­sis, is there­fore not the most suit­able for nur­tur­ing social links. Oth­er devices, such as cor­po­rate social net­works, instant mes­sag­ing, or VoIP – which are very much used by young peo­ple – could be more effective.

You sug­gest “mov­ing from a syn­chro­nous oral cul­ture to an asyn­chro­nous writ­ten cul­ture”, what do you mean by this?

Like hybrid work­ing, the asyn­chro­nous writ­ing mod­el is far from new; in fact, it has been pro­gres­sive­ly rein­forced with the devel­op­ment of dig­i­tal tools such as doc­u­ment stor­age spaces, cor­po­rate social net­works, inte­grat­ed dig­i­tal plat­forms, etc. At the moment, how­ev­er, we tend to over­val­ue the role of syn­chro­nous oral com­mu­ni­ca­tion and there­fore pre­sen­teeism – which is still preva­lent in France – and this is an obsta­cle to the devel­op­ment of remote and hybrid working.

The aim is to take advan­tage of the ben­e­fits of both forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion at work. Asyn­chro­nous writ­ing is par­tic­u­lar­ly suit­ed to deep con­cen­tra­tion and per­son­al reflec­tion and is there­fore ide­al for the “diver­gence” phas­es where each per­son can express his or her opin­ion, free from group pres­sure and shy­ness. On the oth­er hand, syn­chro­nous speak­ing could be more suit­able for phas­es of con­ver­gence where it is no longer a ques­tion of jux­ta­pos­ing ideas but of “work­ing together”.

Thus, hybrid work is not lim­it­ed to a jux­ta­po­si­tion of the meth­ods used to car­ry it out – on site or remote – it is a ques­tion of invent­ing a third way of work­ing by play­ing on the com­ple­men­tar­i­ty between syn­chro­nous (oral) and asyn­chro­nous (writ­ten) work.

Interview by Sophy Caulier