Télétravail à domicile et nouveaux rapports au travail

A systemic approach to interpersonal relationships and activities among French teleworkers

“…Results from this study clearly shows that mobile, full‐time at home and alternating teleworkers do not ascribe the same meaning to their new work situation, and they are different in the ways they reorganise and adjust their system of relationships with others as well as in their activities. The findings thus support and reinforce the argument that we must not consider telecommuters as a homogeneous population and, therefore, specific studies must be done that take into account the variety of teleworking situations, as a complement to studies that propose an overview (Bailey and Kurland, ; Hill et al ., ; Rey and Sitnikoff, ; Camps, ).…”

“…The results show that their considerable time investment at work ultimately occurred at the expense of personal and social life (Hilbrecht et al ., ) in order to preserve their family life. Moreover, the teleworkers' speech clearly underlines the need to develop new time management skills to create new boundaries and to reorganise time for different activities (Sullivan and Lewis, ; Metzger and Cléach, ; Rey and Sitnikoff, ) in order to avoid the deleterious effects of teleworking. In fact, the freedom to organise their working time without formal and imperative safeguards can lead to overwork (Sullivan and Lewis, ; Metzger and Cléach, ) and have adverse effects on health as well as on the balance between the different spheres of life (Hill et al ., ).…”

“…Alternating and at home full-time teleworkers (classes 5 and 2) have, in turn, individual responsibility (Taskin and Devos, 2005) for setting limits between their various spheres of activities. According to existing studies (St-Onge et al, 2000;Sullivan and Lewis, 2001;Montreuil and Lippel, 2003;Metzger and Cléach, 2004;Taskin and Devos, 2005;Rey and Sitnikoff, 2006;Hilbrecht et al, 2008), in order to reconcile these different areas of life, teleworkers had to exercise self-discipline and self-restraint to avoid being overwhelmed by work, to create a physical and symbolic separation of their work environment and to negotiate compromises with their friends and family. One key finding from this study is that the process of reorganising the various activities associated with changing teleworkers' way of working happened gradually and was not without problems.…”

“…It meant making considerable personal effort to overcome the problems arising from intra-and inter-individual deliberations (Curie and Hajjar, 1987;Almudever, 1998;Baubion-Broye and Hajjar, 1998). Once this new organisation had been stabilised, there was a general improvement in quality of life and the quality of family relationships (Baruch, 2000;Metzger and Cléach, 2004;Rey and Sitnikoff, 2006;Golden, 2009). This (re)structuring phase, identified as an 'adjustment period' (Montreuil and Lippel, 2003;Raghuram and Wiesenfeld, 2003;Maruyama et al, 2009), may explain the contrasting results in the literature.…”

“…On the one hand, studies claim that teleworking reduces interruptions, disruptions and distractions at work, thereby increasing concentration, productivity, commitment and quality of work (Bailey and Kurland, 2002;Montreuil and Lippel, 2003;Halford, 2005;Rey and Sitnikoff, 2006), and this is true particularly when employees have support from their managers (St-Onge et al, 2000). Moreover, some studies have shown that the increased feeling of empowerment and motivation at work (Hill et al, 2003) and the increased sense of control over their working time (Montreuil and Lippel, 2003;Maruyama et al, 2009) are ultimately associated with greater satisfaction among teleworkers (Rey and Sitnikoff, 2006). According to Virick et al (2010), teleworkers who work on average the least and the most days per week at home are those who are the least satisfied (an inverse U-shaped relationship).…”