A little over a year ago, the activity of the great majority of companies came to a halt. By decree, or as a consequence. But always abruptly. And then, for many, it resumed, at least partially. Whether on paper or in practice. As lockdowns are lifted, how can we find our way back to full activity? It will not be easy.
Last March, around 12% of private-sector employees were on the short-time working scheme (source: DARES, the French labour ministry’s statistics department). Of course, that is less than a year earlier (35% in March 2020 and 44% in April), but it is a roughly stable volume since December (16% in November). What will it be in April, with the additional restrictions? No less, that much is certain.
For these 2.3 million employees, one spontaneously thinks of sectors closed by administrative order, such as hotels and restaurants (a third of the 2.3 million, with 77% of the sector’s employees affected), or retail (16% of the total and 12% of the sector’s employees).
But other sectors are also significantly affected: 37% of employees in services, 18% in transport equipment manufacturing, 14% in transport and logistics, between 9 and 12% in industry…
In the public sector, the special leave of absence scheme also made it possible to manage enforced inactivity – where remote working was not possible, or for other reasons – with pay maintained. How many public servants were concerned throughout the year? Probably no fewer than in the services sector.
A long period of inactivity – endured or welcomed?
Let us not forget, of course, in addition to these, all those who are not employees. Many professionals in the performing arts and culture-related activities, such as teaching outside the education ministry (around 200,000 people). And all the self-employed in other sectors (3.2 million people), many of whom were forced, by decree or indirectly, into partial or total inactivity.
Many of these workers, employed or not, are in difficult economic situations. And the return to full activity is urgently awaited.
For others, the situation is quite different. Pay cuts partly offset by lower spending on travel, equipment and meals. Or even pay maintained in full. In exchange for more free time. This is often taboo, because who would complain, on the same pay? And we often hear only about complaints – about the trains that run late…
What will motivate them, then, to go back to work full-time? How will they “accept” what some will experience as an additional constraint, in the land of the 35-hour week and of a short-lived “Ministry of Free Time” (created in 1981)?
Remote working: back to realism
Add to the state of this “productive dynamic” the impact of working remotely. After a great moment of enthusiasm – fuelled both by suppliers of digital equipment and services and no doubt also by employees who “benefited” from a relative drop in activity, and for some from a sunny spring in pleasant surroundings – it is time for a return to realism. The realism known to practitioners of these ways of working, whether self-employed or employees of multi-site companies, used to an organised complementarity between remote work and physical interaction. Those who know that “remote working” can only ever be a partial way of working, given its many negative effects. Isolation, with its toxic effects – immediate, but no doubt longer-term too. Inactivity, deliberate or not, in roles whose output is hard to measure. Or, at the other extreme, work overload caused by the difficulty of drawing the line between working time and personal time – on one’s own initiative, for lack of bearings, or under pressure from the organisation. All drawbacks of which those who answered our September 2020 questionnaire were no doubt aware, since overall they wanted only one or two days of remote working. And even then…
So, with the lifting of regulatory constraints – and of those many companies imposed on themselves out of fear of the risks involved rather than out of conviction or to set an example – it will be time for negotiations, to adapt work to the lessons of these past months.
This cannot be handled through institutional approaches alone. Because, given the many individual differences, each team is in a different situation. And as so often, “middle management” will be caught between a rock and a hard place, between company policies and the reality of teams…
Owning each person’s added value
As for those who will seek to improve “quality of working life” at the end of this period, given the individual benefits expected from remote work, others may counter with an assessment of each person’s contribution to the company’s value.
Because throughout these months, and particularly during periods of partial inactivity and physical absence, some individuals, and even some functions, may have revealed how little added value they bring.
In some cases, this was due to the halt in some of the company’s output. And the return to activity will restore their usefulness.
In others, the company may legitimately question the future of a given position. Or consider keeping it permanently “remote” – in a lower-cost country… Especially when the bill for “whatever it takes” comes due, in a competitive context that some will have known how to seize (have you seen China’s growth figures?).
The return to work will therefore have to be a time for collective reflection on each person’s contribution – an opportunity for some to seize, to optimise how everyone works together.
Reweaving social interactions
When this period of enforced inactivity was discussed, we mostly heard about economic support mechanisms (“whatever it takes”…), reducing professional activity to its financial side. Are we merely economic agents, machines for producing and consuming? What about human activity? The dimensions of achievement and social relationships? The meaning of life too, at least in part?
Many have wondered, throughout these past months, about a new balance to be found… This was the case in our survey “at the heart of lockdown”… What about today, a year later? Many companies and managers will have to hear these questions, and provide their share of the answers.
Has anyone talked about the consequences of “social” distancing? Not the kind prescribed and repeated with words chosen with such deliberate brutality, when “physical” distancing was enough for health purposes.
But the kind that the organisation (or disorganisation) of work caused throughout these months. A distancing between staff who saw each other only through screens (if at all). Those whose periods of partial inactivity meant they took turns in the office, without even crossing paths.
A distancing too between those on the “front line”, the production teams, who stayed in the workshop or the shop, and those in “support” roles, or even “management”, who were confined at home, with varying degrees of happiness.
Between those, too, who strove to prolong their absence from the company, and those who demanded to go back, for various reasons.
Between those, finally, who wore themselves out, at their screens or in their offices, making up for the absence of others. And those who watched them – or ignored them.
Pressing the “on” button won’t be enough
In the bureaucratic world rooted in the Taylorist tradition of the human machine, interactions must be kept to a minimum, since the “scientific” organisation of work has defined everyone’s task. And the contribution of each “silo”.
In the world of the human enterprise – particularly in services, creativity, innovation and relationships (and even in more “serious” sectors such as the core functions of the State) – productive effectiveness also, and above all, depends on interactions between people. The very opposite of “social distancing”.
In the light of these many forms of “distancing”, the collective balance sheet – quantitative, qualitative and human – is no doubt catastrophic.
So pressing the “on” button will not be enough to get everything going again.
The wounds of isolation, exhaustion and separation will have to be tended. Those of a new form of “social fracture” too. Fractures born of dysfunctions experienced, of differences in treatment, real or imagined. Others produced by the difficulties of remote management discovered in urgency and pain, on both sides of the relationship. On the part of those who expected more support, and of those who hoped for more autonomy, for example.
Rebuilding collectives
The return to work for all cannot, therefore, do without painstaking work to rebuild collective dynamics. Between those who carried on and those who stopped. Between those who wore themselves out and those who were bored. Between those who are needed and those about whom the question will ultimately be what to do with them. Between those who will be happy to see each other again and those who would have preferred this situation to last. Between those who were affected by the illness and those for whom it remained an invisible constraint.
Getting back together, yes – but to do what, and how? At the risk of restarting on sand, we will therefore need, probably even before the summer, which will be another period of separation, to lay the foundations of our rediscovered work collectives.
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