Home " Blog " Eco-responsibility "
The pandemic has turned our way of working upside down. It has resurrected the possibility of achieving a better work-life balance through the promise of hybrid working. The right mix of telecommuting and face-to-face working has become normalized by the health crisis. However, organizing it is a highly complex task. How can it be successfully implemented, and how can efficient workspaces be created? This question is extremely difficult to answer, and raises a number of different issues that we will address in four sections.
The employee has regained power
Since the Covid-19 crisis, the employee has regained power. In an extremely tight labour market tight labor marketit is now the employee who decides on the balance between face-to-face and teleworking. As a result, employers who try to impose their hybrid work rhythm run the risk of seeing their employees leave. A boss who refused to apply this form of work organization to his employees would have the same result.
This means that working from home is a decisive argument for applying to a company or staying with it. Recent studies, including one by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG ), have shown as much. One employee in three would be prepared to leave his or her job if not allowed to work remotely.
So why are many bosses encouraging to return en masse to the classroom ? When employees can work more efficiently from home, and want to adopt the remote mode of organization for the long term? Telecommuting has many benefits, including a better balance between private and professional life, when both boundaries are clearly defined and demarcated. boundaries are clearly defined and demarcated. This is the case, for example, for the Écocert company, which has adopted this way of working.
Collaboration drives productivity!
They are the managers who act as intermediaries and urge their staff to return to the office, because face-to-face working also has its advantages. It's the only way to maintain a corporate culture based on values. It's also an opportunity to see how employees cope (buy-in, state of mind). In particular, face-to-face meetings are essential for maintaining productivity levels thanks to informal exchanges, which tend to disappear with the virtual world.
Lhe full remote was not the right solution for many companies, who opted to go back to the drawing board by wishing to repatriate employees back to the office presence requirements requirements.
The perfect illustration of this reversal concerns Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, who, for example, threatened to fire his telecommuting employees in an e-mailed note. " The more senior you are, the more you need to be there The more senior you are, the more you need to be there", and employees who don't return to face-to-face work (minimum 40 h per week) will have resigned, according to the carmaker.
A statement that provoked an outcry and added fuel to the fire. But more generally, this message is part of a broad consensus that surrounds companies. Regular or occasional presence in the office makes work flow more smoothly. It also creates human relationships, which are so important in building new projects.
This makes the task of managers a daunting one. In addition to the desire to create new rituals to encourage their staff to return to the office, they seek above all to bring them all together on the same day, according to each person's schedule.
Towards sober workspaces
This is when hybrid work raises the issue of optimizing workspaces. These spaces need to be completely reinvented, since employees are no longer physically present in buildings every day of the week. The reduction in floor space can easily amount to more than 25%.
Companies are now focusing on collaboration and optimizing their square footage. More than ever, the site manager More than ever, site managers are under pressure from senior management to keep real estate costs to a minimum, and to reduce their carbon footprint. What's the point of supplying energy to unused space? How can we predict who will be in the office tomorrow? How do you measure the adequacy of space in relation to the needs of employees and teams?
Businesses must commit to a more responsible use of workspaces. From now on, all companies must have decarbonization objectives for their buildings. Sober use of space is part of the corporate agenda.
The eco-responsible employee
Hybrid working has therefore created a real energy awareness, which is gradually gaining in importance within companies. This is a crucial issue, all the more so in view of current fears of an energy shortage in the country. Indeed, as declared by Élisabeth Borne to the Medef, on Monday August 29.
"Now is not the time for half-measures, now is not the time for every man for himself, now is the time for collective responsibility."
"Faced with the threat of shortages, we have only one path: to reduce energy consumption, and if we were to resort to rationing, businesses would be the first to suffer," continued the Prime Minister. She therefore invited companies to draw up "energy sobriety plans" as early as September, with a view to reducing their consumption by 10%, before an initial assessment of these savings plans at the beginning of October.
The government is therefore pressure on companies to be energy-efficient to be energy-efficient and use space wisely.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is thus logically concerned. Encouraging greener mobility and maximizing car-pooling, switching off night-time lighting in offices and shops, and reducing air-conditioning and heating in offices are all avenues to be explored. We no longer need the huge head offices of yesteryear, with dozens of meeting rooms, which are now virtually empty most of the time.
As a direct consequence, more and more employees are becoming eco-responsible. In addition to their desire to reduce their carbon footprint in their daily rituals, they are becoming aware of this problem in the office, noting that too many spaces are going unused.
Conclusion
It's all about find a balance. This is specific to each company by measuring the efficiency of workspaces and their quality of use. In addition, we need to meet employee expectations (hybrid planning). Optimize square meters to reduce the carbon footprint without impacting on team productivity. This harmony is collective and absolutely fundamental to a company's performance.
Article by Fabien Girerd, CEO and Founder of Jooxter
