According to a study, companies are showing themselves “cautious” or even “reluctant” to telework, even if internal agreements are on the increase
The pandemic has given a boost to teleworking but the agreements signed in 2020 show a still “cautious” or even “reluctant” approach by companies, according to a study by the National Agency for the Improvement of Working Conditions (Anact) .
At a time when the Minister of Labor Élisabeth Borne calls on companies to “accelerate” the use of telework to deal with the Omicron variant of Covid-19, Anact publishes on its site (www.anact.fr) an analysis of a sample of 40 collective agreements signed in 2020, taken from the D @ ccord statistical database of the Ministry of Labor (Dares).
Teleworking is the subject of a growing number of agreements: 2,720 in 2021, according to figures from the ministry as of November 15, after 1,980 for the year 2020.
“Following the first containment linked to Covid, many companies negotiated their first teleworking agreement or renegotiated the existing agreement,” note the Anact researchers.
A national inter-professional agreement (ANI) of 6 November 2020 – “For a successful implementation of teleworking” – proposed a general framework, supplementing and extending a previous ANI dating from 2005.
“If these texts mark an increase since the start of the crisis, the upward trend has been expressed since 2018 (+ 30% annually) while telework is not a compulsory negotiation topic”, notes Anact .
“Right to telework”
The study looks at the size of the companies concerned: 40% have 50 to 250 employees, those with less than 50 employees or 250 to 1,000 are then represented in an equivalent proportion (25% each) and 10% have more than 1,000 employees.
Regarding the sectors of activity, in 2020, the most represented are the manufacturing industry and specialized scientific and technical activities (16%), financial and insurance activities (11%), automotive (11% ), information and communication (8%).
Anact draws up a typology according to the teleworking approach which appears in the texts between the “reluctant”, “cautious”, “convinced” and “experimenters”. About a third of the agreements studied offer a maximum day of teleworking per week or even less, and half of them offer two days per week maximum. This leads “to think that ‘reluctant’ or ‘cautious’ type agreements remain in the majority in 2020”.
Based on the agreements concluded in very small and medium-sized enterprises, the researchers estimate that “before the crisis, (it was) often the individual approach to teleworking that was implemented […] with case-by-case management of requests ”, in connection with personal situations.
2020 and its confinements mark an evolution with teleworking apprehended “as the transposition of office activities to the home” but not yet perceived “as a form of work organization in its own right […] mixing face-to-face and distance learning ”.