Teleworking scientific survey - During lockdown, teleworkers were overworked but globally satisfied.

Results of the scientific survey on teleworking 

On April 3rd, we made an announcement to you about the international research initiative by Kevin Carillo and Alain Klarsfeld (TBS Business School), Gaelle Cachat-Rosset and Tania Saba (University of Montreal) and Josianne Marsan (University of Laval).

With over 15000 replies, this research team has been able to prove that: 

In spite of the difficult lockdown conditions, the level of satisfaction regarding teleworking appears to be high, even if it was felt that the workload was greater. 

This comes to light from the survey we conducted between 2nd and 16th April which included approximately 1220 French employees.

All those who replied were teleworking, the majority of whom were forced to do so by their employeur (77%). According to our study, 80% of those who responded declare that they are "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with teleworking. Furthermore, contrary to all expectations, the perception that the greater quantity of work accomplished from home went hand in hand with greater satisfaction from work. The principle reason for this is that teleworkers felt more productive when the combined conditions allowed them to feel more satisfied. 

Greater confidence amongst managers  

Autonomy is a decisive factor as regards teleworking. Amongst those employees who were "in total agreement" with the fact that they had great autonomy to carry our their jobs, the percentage of those who were satisfied or very satisfied reached 83%.

However, employees had mixed opinions on feeling more productive (shared by only 34% of those who replied, compared to 29% who had felt the opposite, 37% were neutral), or moreover the desire to continue teleworking (38% were in favour but 41% were not, 21 % were indifferent). If a certain amount of wariness applied before the crisis, it is relatively less so after lockdown.  

In our study, the wariness felt was low : a minority of employees thought that "their team members spent their time on other things rather than on the jobs they were assigned." Before the covid crisis, managers were sometimes perceived as showing resistence to giving permission to telework due to the fact that they felt they would loose control. In fact, 65% of managers (against 60% of non-managers) appeared to show high confidence in their team members. Only 10% admitted that they were distrustful.

Women had less freedom to manage their time 

Our study also shows that women are more at risk of exhaustion than men. The way teleworking is organized at present means that employees have to work in the presence of dependent people, generally children. Amongst the teleworkers, women were subjected to the demands of dependent people to a greater extent, in their words, those who needed "more than 4 hours attention every day, encroaching on work time". In France, 10,3% of women who replied where in extreme conditions, while men were at 7%.

Finally, the number of women who thought "that things went as they wanted" were lower than men (60% and 71% respectively) when they answered the survey. In spite of this, their satisfaction as regards teleworking was on much the same level as men's satisfaction. 

Confusion should not be made between autonomy and isolation

In summary, our results seem to encourage more widespread implementation of this practice in the future, in particular, with respect to the difficult context in which teleworking was tested (obligatory, improvised teleworking, which often took place in the presence of dependent people). What emerges is that in order to develop teleworking in the best possible conditions for everyone concerned, there are many levers of action. They are dependent on a certain amount of conditions :

• Allow employees autonomy to fulfill their tasks 
• Make sure that the home is also a confortable work place with the suitable technology ; without these, offer a third work place near the employee's home which satisfies these criteria
• Set up measures that will consolidate private and professional life (for example, child minding formulas which suit teleworking conditions)
• Train employees in digital skills which are critical in this type of organization and keep in mind that digitalization must be perceived as being pertinent in relation to the quality and quantity of work to be produced. Unbridled digitalization is not necessary   
• Plan a strategy to both officially tackle isolation (follow-up on work by the manager) and non-formally (informal contact and emotional support of colleagues). It is important to highlight this last point because, if such great autonomy means that teleworking is a good experience, it depends on relationships with others being preserved. Isolation impacts the satisfaction variables more than any other factors as regards teleworking. It must therefore be broken down at all costs. 

This article is part of the international research program with Kevin Carillo and Alain Klarsfeld (TBS Business School), Gaelle Cachat-Rosset and Tania Saba (University of Montreal) and Josianne Marsan (University of Laval).