InvestigationWith the development of tracking tools and the advent of telecommuting, employee monitoring has moved online. There remains the difficulty of drawing the line between supervision and policing.
“Basically, we were already policed, but teleworking did not help matters”, laments Sybile (at the request of the employee, the first name has been changed). When this teleconsultant at Macif has the opportunity to work from home, her manager is no longer behind her back. But it pops up on his screen. “We get a chat or an email as soon as we wait more than three or four minutes between two calls. Sometimes there are so many windows that open asking us “what are you doing?” you can’t even see the screen. I have a colleague who was criticized for logging in at 8:02 a.m. instead of 8:00 a.m. »
To this continuous monitoring by interposed screens are added performance tables to be filled in regularly, vituperates Sybile. In the eyes of the employee, this control “infantilizing” has a negative impact on team motivation: “Some of my colleagues experience this as harassment. » For its part, Macif told us that it did not wish to comment on this subject.
How many employees, like Sybile, have seen telework go hand in hand with a bit too much surveillance? With the first confinement, in March 2020, this organization of remote work imposed itself by force on employers. A culture shock in a country which had 7% of employees working from home in 2017, according to estimates from the statistics department of the Ministry of Labor. Companies have long held back the idea of transposing the office to the home. In November 2021, the boss of Medef, Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, recalled the image of “gland” which was attached to it. ” Telecommuting has been a source of disruption for many managers, confirms Florent Frontela, human capital director at Deloitte. Not having employees in front of them anymore worries them. »
To believe one study by Vanson Bourne for the software publisher VMware published in 2021, 63% of French companies are planning or have already adopted tools aimed at strengthening their supervision. According to Régis Chatellier, in charge of innovation and prospective studies at the National Commission for Computing and Liberties (CNIL), some employers may have been tempted to cross the yellow line: “From the first confinement, we had had a lot of calls which raised fears that there could be attempts to monitor people working from home more than necessary. »
At IBM, Yannick Edouard, the CFE-CGC central union representative, recounts some overzealousness on the part of certain managers: “At the very beginning of confinement, some organized a videoconference in the early morning and asked employees to stay connected for the rest of the day. » This practice was marginal, relativizes the union delegate, and the management very quickly put an end to it.
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