MDespite an undeniable evolution of morals, French management has not completely broken with its presentist demons. The absurd equation of assuming an equivalence between presence and professional involvement continues to be valid, even remotely. So much so that a new archetype has emerged, the monstrous child of teleworking and corporate surveillance: the telepresenter. Both absent and omnipresent.
To describe this new state, where we are not physically there but where we manifest ourselves through digital tools, researcher Christian Licoppe speaks of “connected presence”. “What gives substance to presence here is not the co-presence of bodies and the (hypothetical) concentration of attention, it is the frequency of contacts and the temporal continuity that they establish”he writes in his text “The forms of presence” (French journal of information and communication sciences, 2012). Presence as a state (physical and psychological) has been replaced by a signaling presence, detached from “being here and now”.
Like in the past the good old martingale of the jacket left on the back of the office chair to make it appear that we are in the toilet when we have gone shopping, the signals sent by frenzied use of Slack, Teams and Another Hangout are among the many tricks that the telepresenter will implement to appear as if they are fully dedicated to their work.
Showing up very early in the morning with a simple “hello” will make you look like a guy who starts his work day at dawn, even if, in real life, you are welcoming the heating engineer in your pajamas. Ditto if a message surprises you in the delicatessen section of Monoprix during your working hours: “I’ll answer you later, I’m meeting outside”will then throw out, in half a second, the telepresenter, who likes to let it be known that he spares no effort, he is also the type to post on social networks photos of himself swallowing a sandwich in front of her laptopaccompanied by the hashtags #workfromhome and #viededingue.
Supervise the activity of remote employees
Insert yourself into email loops, say hello to your superiors by asking them a “super important” question by text, intervene in a significant way in a video before discreetly cutting the camera and the sound (incidentally, choosing a background (screen that will evoke work and not a Mexican Riviera setting) are good ways to show yourself tele-involved.
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