Telework During The Health Crisis (And After): Reinvent Your Job!
The company is no longer a place focused solely on production and income. Employee well-being, both physical and emotional, is a problem that turns out to be crucial for sustaining their morale and effectiveness. Arrangements are introduced, often timidly: flexible hours, installation in qualified premises of exercise rooms, telecommuting. When the latter, in the light of the news of this beginning of the year 2020, continues to grow strongly, it contributes to a broader reflection on the job and the way it is practiced.
Teleworking Widespread During Coronavirus Health Crisis
Often seen as an element of comfort whose necessity had to be proven, during the health crisis, telework found a new meaning: to save lives. Strengthened reflection on the evolution of work and how to do it, has given ideas – and desires – to many employees.
Praised advantages
Some have long been familiar with the personal benefits of telecommuting. Firstly, there is the comfort of working at home, offset by colleagues’ lack of social interaction and the need for face-to-face moments. All of this is balanced by part time telework.
The other benefits, these big ones, are due to the day-to-day organization: simpler child care, à la carte hours, extended sleep by saving travel time. On the other hand, we find a collective benefit: less congestion and pollution, with the resulting effect of collective stress reduction.
The company is there
Telework as a factor in employee well-being is a part of the company. Furthermore, economies of scale on operating costs can be achieved. On the efficiency side, the findings, backed by the report, are decent or even excellent as demonstrated by the Ministry of Economy and Finance.
Let us add that the technology, thanks to the various videoconferencing tools and the Internet network, is ready to enable a massive evolution in this area.
Classic work long questioned
But when we talk about teleworking, we are mostly talking about the recent development in businesses, most often large. The aspirations to exercise one’s professional activity differently do not date from 2020 and have materialized in several ways.
The proliferation of self-employed workers
France has a population of more than three million. The desire to free oneself from the control of the employers and the desire to arrange one’s everyday life according to one’s personal background are definitely major reasons for the creation of this multifaceted entrepreneurship for which INSEE provides us with precise statistics.
The trend is followed by a desire from companies to outsource a growing array of tasks to freelancers’ advantage. We are released from the wage expenses and the need for preparation, making the process more efficient.
In addition, independent coworking spaces are increasing in large cities, allowing the idea of “colleagues” to be rediscovered while maintaining complete autonomy.
Integration into networks: sustained independence
Another way to build your own job is to join a network which is the concept that occurs in many fields today. This affiliation can in principle be exercised in two distinct ways: providing services linked to one’s own know-how and benefiting from the network’s advantages, or offering to sell products on behalf of the network.
In both cases, the organization offers management, networking and training services aimed at relieving self-employed people from jobs of lower added value or growing their skills. The self-employed individual remains his own boss and, through fees, remunerates the network for the support he provides and enjoys the feeling of belonging to the community.
A concrete example in strong development
There is one field in which the two ways of acquiring freedom are pursued and trivialized today: real estate. Success is all the better as it’s an endeavor that doesn’t suffer from the lack of social interaction, the work of making it.
Independent agents
Under total autonomy, independent real estate agents mostly exercise from home and manage all of the processes of marketing, sales support and business management.
True business leaders, they must inevitably maintain a personal network to rapidly identify opportunities for purchasing and reselling in an extremely competitive market – while maintaining the distribution, correspondence, and accounting administration of their operations. It’s not always obvious, particularly because, during a slow time like the health crisis, they can only depend on themselves. This causes many to turn to a more collaborative organization.
Real estate agents
Strong field agents in a decentralized and centralized real estate network, they are the evolution of the profession which is experiencing the greatest development. The parent company offers vital tools for management, communication, and legal, in short everything required to allow the field agent to concentrate on what interests him the most: relationships with his buying and selling clients.
Communication and intelligence research being performed at national or even international level, the agent may also benefit from leads that lighten his commercial effort. A key point in the evolution of work can be found here: everyone tries to reduce the limitations of their professional practice in order to spend more time performing activities that are more rewarding, in terms of added benefit or enthusiasm for their career.
The health problem associated with the coronavirus would definitely have an effect on professional ambitions, it seems clear. Immediately restricted to their houses, they would be able to sense the need for freedom or tasks carried out differently by workers who have never used telework before. The global reflection has only just started, with regard to the gestures of the barriers and the social distancing that seem to have to continue. By organizing itself in the face of these imperatives, companies are at the core of a transformation that many of us want to call “the next world.”