News hardware Teleworking would make us lose more than an hour a day!
Published on 04/09/2022 at 10:30
A study shows that during telecommuting most employees find themselves wasting time wanting to show that they are active. A vicious circle that reduces productivity and comfort at work.
Telecommuting does not work with office hours
Telecommuting brings many benefits. The freedom to be able to choose your schedules and take breaks when necessary. But the reality is often very different. The fear of letting people think that you are not being productive all the time can lead to a waste of time. Wanting to show that you are active makes you effective. A vicious circle discovered by experts from software publishers Qatalog and GitLab.
In a perfect world, we might imagine not needing to log on to meetings that don’t concern us and to take useful breaks during the down times of our day.
The study of Qatalog and GitLab
was conducted on 2000 employees in the United States and the United Kingdom, working mainly on their computers from home. This demonstrates the evolution that quarantine periods might have brought to the world of work. Instead of revolutionizing the sector, we returned to the old model. According to Tariq Rauf, CEO of Qatalog :
We might have restructured work to be asynchronous, allowing us to build work around our lives, but we failed. Now, our research shows that we fall back into old habits – ones that should have been abandoned when we had the chance.
This study encourages a new kind of telecommuting
The study document details a new way of approaching teleworking. Called asynchronous telework, it offers greater freedom to the employee. His working time is better optimized and allows for more efficient days. The study tends to prove that teleworking in its current model causes more than one hour of productivity to be lost per day.
The principle is to work at times that are more optimized for your pace. So we can have an effective person in the morning, but who has trouble at the end of the day. It just needs to start earlier. Conversely, if a person is effective in the evening, why allow him to start later. This method must obviously continue to allow communication within the team. But it is nothing new.
Despite this rather negative current feeling, progress has been observed. The study shows that 65% of workers have more flexibility in their work. A majority even think that this will increase over time and with new managerial methods.
It also happens that people do not see this progress as positive. For 11% of them, the current model is very good and should not be changed. Even if they are a minority, they prefer to return to the pre-pandemic, with traditional face-to-face office hours.
In the end, it is regarding two visions of the world of work which clash. Quality of work life should improve over time according to the study, although they see a slight setback in progress since the end of multiple quarantines.
