Flex office, hybrid work and the challenges for managers

Expert

The flex office is seen not only as a source of savings for the company, but also - and this is often the subject of speeches - as an innovative work organization, designed to transform operating modes towards greater cross-functionality and collaboration between the employees who work there.

It should be remembered, however, that while the workspace can influence the activity of those who share it, it does not completely determine it. Employees will not spontaneously and naturally collaborate more simply because they share the same space. Collaboration stems from an adjustment of professional logics, which also involves inter-knowledge, mutual aid and the building of trust between players. This adjustment needs to be framed by common objectives and challenges, both within a team and between members of different teams working on the same site. In this sense, local managers have a role to play in orchestrating these discussions concerning the definition of possible common objectives and activities, both with other managers and employees on the shared plateau, and with their own team members. What's more, the interdependence between players and the multilateral exchanges this cooperation entails take time to build up, and need to be projected into the construction of long-term actions. These managerial regulations are also important not only to define, with the teams present on the set, the ways of operating in these shared spaces, but also to ensure that the rules thus co-constructed are applied.

These managerial challenges linked to the flexibility of the working environment interfere with two others brought about by the development of mass telecommuting: the rebalancing between presence and distance according to the context, and the collective co-construction of uses, closely linked to the activity.

On the one hand, while face-to-face meetings enable spontaneous exchanges, unmediated by tools and enriched by the way bodies express themselves, distance allows for a "latency period", conducive to reflection, stepping back and prioritizing certain tasks. From this point of view, one of the roles of managers is also to make their team members aware of the need to maintain a balance between presence and distance, depending on the work context, the people they work with and the needs of their activity, in order to reduce the risk of weakening social ties. Nevertheless, field surveys show that these collective time-space regulations remain difficult to implement. Depending on the context, employee profiles and links established within the collectives, schedules with days of presence on site are, for example, more or less filled out and kept up to date. Interviewees' explanations on this subject (often referring to the possibility of being "flipped" by doing so) remind us that visibility of oneself and one's activities within the company is strategic. The days of compulsory presence on site, which some managers have set themselves, sometimes remain the only safe point for face-to-face meetings.

On a more general note, telecommuting, which is an extension of face-to-face work (and vice versa), requires a great deal of vigilance on the part of managers, in terms of recognition (of telecommuters who may feel forgotten or useless), maintaining communication and cohesion (not neglecting those who are at a distance), clarifying the new forms of control generated by this remote work, or regulating and arbitrating any conflicts (by mitigating certain reluctance to return to their place of work).

On the other hand, more widespread telecommuting has led to a more marked spread of collaborative tools within companies. For managers, this raises the challenge of co-constructing the use of these tools within their teams and between teams. Raising employees' awareness of the benefits of using these tools, and the implementation by companies of systems enabling them to familiarize themselves with the functionalities of the tools on offer (workshops, tutorials, webinars, etc.) are necessary, but not sufficient conditions. Usage is not just a matter of communication and mastery of tools. They are indeed the result of social processes taking place in local contexts, processes during which members of work collectives (more or less ephemeral, larger or smaller) need to agree on the added value of these tools in their work, and to co-construct their rules of use in relation to activities that are also collective. The appropriation of digital tools within teams therefore also depends on the ability of managers to orchestrate local collective discussions on the added value of these tools in their work, on ways of using them together, on the personalization of these tools in relation to the team's activity, but also on the changes to be made and carried through in the organization of this activity to achieve a successful adjustment between activity and tool functionalities. 

References

• Benedetto-Meyer, M., Boboc, A. (2021). Sociologie du numérique au travail, Ed. Armand Colin, Paris

Release date: June 2023