“Current management tends to train employees to make them individuals without anchoring, without a past, who can be moved around as they wish”

Since the end of the pandemic, there has been a growing trend for companies to bring their employees together in atypical places. Among them, private apartments are increasingly popular. Aurélie Jeantet, sociologist, author of Emotions at work (CNRS, 2018), analyzes this craze for homestay meetings.

How to explain that companies prefer to meet in apartments rather than in traditional offices?

This is part of what is called “the comedy of work”. Employees are installed in a setting, like extras in a film. They find themselves in an unreal setting, which is neither their home nor a defined place of work. In an office where we go daily, we create benchmarks, we are in a setting that tells a story. By going to work with people you don’t know, by constantly changing places, the work becomes unrealistic.

Some platforms even want to set up partnerships with furniture or household appliance brands. What do these synergies inspire in you?

These brands correspond to the standards of beauty, good taste, that of the urban upper classes. It’s a way to make the employee dream, to make him dangle the social success that awaits him if he satisfies his hierarchy. Rather than taking him to a hotel, a space that refers to escaping away from home, we transport him on the contrary to a fantasized domestic universe, as if we wanted to shape both his professional life and his private life.

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Is this unreal dimension part of a management strategy?

Yes quite. The current management tends to format the employees to make them individuals without anchoring, without past, that one can move at will. All the studies on the “flex office” (the fact of not having a fixed office in the company) have shown that instability is detrimental to well-being at work. It also prevents the construction of a real corporate culture, the establishment of solidarity. Even though the routine may seem boring, it also helps to work and bond with others.

However, fun activities are supposed to strengthen the bond between employees. This is the concept of “team building”, very popular in companies…

This practice raises questions since it is mandatory. Do employees have the choice of doing an escape game or working by the pool? It can be extremely frowned upon to refuse it. By installing them in pleasant settings, we are giving them a gift that they did not ask for. It’s the logic of “because you’re worth it”. However, as we know, any gift entails an obligation vis-à-vis the one who offers it to you. In a superb loft with a view of all of Paris, it would be out of place to be in a bad mood or to show your displeasure, as one might do at the office. This artificial decor, supposed to be warm and cozy, contributes to the emotional normalization of behavior. It’s the as if management, the management of the “as if”. We act as if everything was fine, as if we were a group of friends having a meal… We have no choice but to be in a good mood and to wear the smile, which is the prescribed expression in business.

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