Many companies have adopted telework as a managerial practice in its own right. Telework is even considered a given expected by job-seeking talents. Teams in “full remote” or working from home part of the week are not uncommon. However, they face their own challenges, including the difficulty of reconciling private and professional life. Today, we are giving you some tips to help your teams better reconcile professional and personal life while working remotely.
Teleworking: where is the border between professional life and personal life?
Finding the limit between professional life and personal life can be a big challenge for your telework teams. This balance is what keeps your talents focused, productive and happy at work.
But what makes this border so fuzzy, finally? Let’s see what the employees concerned tell us most often:
- Hyperconnectivity. Since the place of life and the place of work are the same, when does the work stop? Without a framework, it can be difficult to set boundaries. Moreover, hyperconnectivity often leads to checking professional emails outside office hours, in the evening or on weekends. This promotes neither essential rest for productivity nor good relationships with loved ones.
- Get distracted. And yes, when you’re at home, it’s easy to get distracted: cleaning, after-school homework help and other tasks can easily interfere with the workday.
- The absence of a physical border between professional life and personal life, which does not help to establish a psychological border either.
Manager: how to help employees reconcile professional life and personal life?
Managing remote teams of course requires respecting certain main principles aimed at guaranteeing productivity and efficiency. The same goes for guaranteeing a good QVT (quality of life at work) even when this work does not take place on the premises of the organization.
The right to disconnect
The right to disconnect is a fundamental tool to promote a better balance between personal and professional life. It is also now included in the Labor Code to protect employees from any abuse.
Companies and managers have a real responsibility to respect the right to disconnect, and this must translate into real commitment. Indeed, the organization can plan to engage in a dialogue with its various stakeholders in order to co-create a charter. This must in particular provide for the terms and conditions for the full exercise by the employee of his right to disconnect. It is also effective to set up devices for regulating the use of digital toolswith a view to ensuring respect for rest and leave times as well as for personal life.
Anticipate the risks
To avoid employee discomfort, it is crucial to anticipate and assess the risks associated with teleworking. To better protect your teams (and yourself, at the same time), it can be very useful to co-build with your teams a risk matrix for remote work, shift work and telework. This will allow you to better identify the sensitive points and the reality of your teams, and to find together reasonable solutions to facilitate their daily life.
It is now more than necessary to rethink and rebuild spaces for discussion and moderation to make teleworking effective and pleasant for everyone. So, shall we get together?
