The no man’s land of Friday: the offices are empty and the business districts deserted… Do you think of the employees who went away for the weekend, slanderers that you are? If Friday is the most teleworking day of the week, the fact that it is adjacent to Saturday and Sunday sows confusion: are the employees working or preparing the dinner they are organizing with friends that same evening? “Friday is a real subject”, dares Anne-Lise Langlais, founder of the production studio Goodbye CharlieWho ” [se] asks questions” about the management of this day within his team of eight people: “I haven’t made a decision yet but we can wonder if it’s a good thing, when we see that, sometimes, we has no one there. Monday can also be problematic: people have to be there because we need to get together. »
“The end of teleworking has not come”
So that everyone is on site at the start of the week, meeting days where plans and objectives are defined, “many companies have imposed presence on Mondays and Tuesdays,” explains Alexis Berthel, HR director and member of the national association of HR managers. (ANDRH). In this case, employees can choose two days of teleworking out of the three remaining. » Other companies have decided to put an end to remote working, in the United States (Google, Amazon, Zoom, Disney, etc.) and now in France, such as Groupama Immobilier since November 14.
For Alexis Berthel and ANDRH, these few companies, even if they get a lot of attention, should not make us forget that “managers have developed know-how in managing teleworking and, in a majority of cases, it works. The end of teleworking has not come in France,” he assures. At the end of 2022, the same collective also observed that working from home on Friday did not mean a drop in productivity for companies.
The employee has already gone away for the weekend, so what?
At the house of Welcome to the Jungle, we have no problem with Monday or any day of the week: “Potentially, the employee will leave for the weekend a little earlier, so what? He may have been super efficient on Friday morning and achieved his objectives in four hours,” says Mathilde Fontaine, head of HR operations at the Parisian start-up, at the forefront of the issue of well-being at work. A flexibility that agrees with the indecisive Anne-Lise Langlais, at Goodbye Charlie: “If the employee slows down on Friday but comes back on Monday with a headache, that’s OK. »
And what about Wednesday in all this? Second most teleworked day after Friday for reasons of family organization, it can also raise doubts about the efficiency of the employee (most often the female employee). Doubts that Alexis Berthel immediately resolves: “You can very well warn your employer that you will not be on duty long enough to take your child to an activity, and thus maintain transparency. At the same time, if you work on the 25th floor of a Defense tower, going to smoke downstairs can take you twenty minutes during which your manager doesn’t know where you are. » Finally, the suspicions of laziness which weigh on the teleworker can undoubtedly be resolved as follows: adapted and interesting challenges and a good dose of “teleconfidence”.