Category: Work

Le télétravail, c’est fou !

Je choisis volontairement un titre à la fois ambigu et provocateur pour exprimer ma déception face à l’obstination de notre employeur et son entêtement à ignorer le progrès que représente le télétravail. Car j’en ai gros [sur le ❤️] à ce sujet. C’est une situation que je pratique depuis une quinzaine d’années ou plus, sur presque 23 –gasp ! Je ne suis pas seule à être en télétravail, et pourtant, on nous refuse de l’élargir à tous.

Bonjour, je suis Coralie, élue déléguée du personnel titulaire depuis presque dix ans, et c’est source de moultes frustrations !

Le Monde publiait hier dans sa section Économie un article intitulé « Le télétravail améliorerait la productivité », alors que j’ai encore aujourd’hui dans la bouche le goût amer que m’ont laissé les deux tentatives récentes de négociations avec la direction des ressources humaines, visant à généraliser le télétravail potentiellement total à ceux de mes collègues qui peuvent le pratiquer, qui le souhaitent, et pour qui ce n’est pas encore autorisé.

Car chez nous, même si la majorité du personnel est en capacité d’effectuer l’activité professionnelle de n’importe où, seuls certains sont télé-travailleurs à temps plein.

Or, le grand fossé qui sépare les uns des autres n’est pas près de se combler, alors même que durant les dix-huit mois suivant le premier confinement Covid-19, l’intégralité du personnel a été en télétravail.

Pour la Direction il ne fait aucun doute que tous ceux pour qui c’était nouveau sont rapidement et efficacement passés en mode « travail à distance ». Belle preuve d’agilité et belle faculté d’adaptation ! Les collègues ont su mettre en place d’eux-mêmes les protocoles répondant au mieux à leurs besoins et utilisé des méthodes simples, logiques et optimisées.

Pourtant début octobre ce n’est pas ce que la Direction a choisi de mettre en exergue pour justifier son refus de généraliser le télétravail. Non, ce qui fut déclaré, c’est que personne en France ne fait du télétravail complet, et que les accords nationaux interprofessionnels recommandent un maximum de trois jours par semaine télé-travaillés, insistant sur un équilibre servant à éviter tous risques psycho-sociaux.

Mesurez s’il vous plaît l’ironie de la situation : L’organisation pour laquelle je travaille (en télétravail total, depuis des années) met en place de manière collective et collaborative les standards du web, mais la société qui m’emploie pour faire cela prétend qu’aucune boîte française ne fait du télétravail total (*), et ainsi n’admet pas la généralisation au reste de son personnel de ce statut auquel tous se sont parfaitement adaptés.

(*) hmmm, et donc quid de mon statut de télé-travailleuse ?

(L’organisation légale est complexe mais pour simplifier, je suis employée par une société pour travailler dans une autre, telle un projet. Et pour continuer dans le complexe, notre Comité social et économique (CSE) est constitué de trois personnes affectées à ce projet et d’une travaillant pour la société directement. Je suis l’une des deux titulaires au CSE et j’ai donc pris part aux négociations en octobre et bis repetita en novembre.)

Mes collègues se contentent de ce qu’on leur accorde. Moi, de l’autre côté du fossé, je vois ça comme une punition à leur égard dont je ne comprends pas la justification.

Question bonus : Quid des risques psycho-sociaux pour ceux d’entre nous en télétravail total depuis des années ? Aucune idée. La question est posée mais restée sans réponse.

Work won’t love you back

2022-08-03 Update: reflected that the transition to a legal entity was postponed by a year; gave link to media advisory of that transition; rewrote two phrases.

Abstract of what is on my mind: work is transactional by nature, excellent connections with coworkers are precious (I am fortunate to have many). Now, the companies that consider their work force “family” puzzle me. This is not exactly the case where I work (or is it?), BUT we are in a setting that is pretty conducive to it, AND after 27 years, this is going to change –in less than a year two years. SO I really wonder what that change will do to the current equilibrium (I’m pretty sure it’s going to put it to the test).

Screenshot of a Tweet by Kevin pointing out that work won’t love you back

This stemmed from my browsing The Twitters yesterday. I read Kevin‘s tweet.

He wrote ““work won’t love you back.” And as much as I’ve loved the people I’ve worked with, it’s always turned to be correct.“

Screenshot of the The tweets that Kevin quoted, referring to work as family but also as being a transaction

Kevin was quoting another Twitter thread where I read “it’s so emotionally damaging when companies self-style their workers as ‘family’. you can have deep emotional connections with your coworkers, if you’re lucky, but don’t forget that work relationships are fundamentally transactional. i hope your family is not.“

I don’t consider my workplace to be like family and we aren’t self-styled as such either. But, work is very central in my life: every other week I spend most of my waking time at work (the other week, I am solo parent of a teenager, spending just normal amounts of time at work).

Firstly, I am fortunate to have very deep emotional connections with many of my coworkers, a few of which I even regard as father parent figures, many of which are true models for me, most of which I respect tremendously.

Secondly, we have very little turnover. I’ve worked there for over 22 years and many current colleagues were already in the team when I joined. And we welcome newcomers, not as siblings, but with similar care and attention to their success. As though we have a stake in it –and we do, yes.

Thirdly, we get together (we used to, pre-COVID at least) every now and then and those occasions are always enjoyable and looked forward to by most. Yes, like any other workplaces, there are difficult people who get along with fewer people, or are not interested in making any connections at all. That’s my description of our unusual work environment. In fact, I remember how I described it to my mum a few years into it: it’s like summer camp where you make new great friends and do exciting stuff, but it’s all year-round.

Now, our administrative setup allows us to do our work without a whole lot of competition, without too many frustrations, because we are employed by four different institutions that legally “host” our consortium, and in most of our cases, the people who employ us are not those we take work orders from. I think that makes a world of a difference.

Change is coming. The Hosts arrangement, in place from the start in 1994, has enough drawbacks that for a few years now we have been exploring how to become our own legal entity. This is set to happen on January 1, 2022 2023. When it does, the consortium will have its own bank account, legal and fiduciary obligations, and traditional management powers that we currently do not fully have.

The dynamics are bound to change. While today I (and many others in the team) are moved by the sheer impact our work has on society (HTML –heard of it? CSS, Web accessibility, Internationalization, etc. We are the little known consortium that makes the Web work, for everyone) and the Hosts that employ us provide the best abstraction to shield us from the reality of the transactional nature of work, this is going has the potential to hit us in the face like the train crashing Dr. Woodward’s truck in the movie Super 8!

There is a lot on our plates and most of us overwork because it’s really worth it! I remind myself on occasion that work won’t love me back, but once we are truly as valuable as our ability to make the company money, I wonder how the care will fare.

Pranking

This week was a good week. I engineered a prank at work that brought much fun and entertainment, and made the week even better. A prank in 3 acts.

Act 1

We use Zoom for our meetings and when I noticed, just as I was leaving at the end of a meeting, that a colleague of mine wasn’t at his desk, I thought I just had missed an opportunity to take a screenshot of his room without him, and later use it as my own background image and see his face as he realized!

So I went back, found his room still empty and quickly took a screenshot. I was in the process of making my window bigger to take a better screenshot when he showed up. Uh oh! “Oh, you were waiting for me to return?,” he asked. I couldn’t quickly enough come up with a good excuse for the probably guilty look on my face, so I just fessed up. Good laugh was had. And see you next time, wink wink!

The next thing I did was to quickly edit out his name from the bottom left part of the screenshot. I saved the photo somewhere I could open it on my iPhone and used the “healing” tool of Snapseed (my favourite —and free— image edition software on smartphone), which basically redraws an area of your choice using its surrounding. Then I adjusted a bit the sharpness and reduced the noise to get the best out of that pretty small screenshot.

Then I tested it as my own Zoom virtual background 👌and gave him a preview.

Screenshot of an instant message conversation where I showed a picture of my zoom using as background the image I stole of a colleague's background. That colleague liked the result and gave a star-eyed emoji as response
a glimpse of what it looked like when I use this picture as my Zoom background

Act 2

I wrote to everyone-but-him in the team who usually attends our weekly all-hands meeting (which was the next day) and shared my “work” and the context, offering them to join me in escalating the prank, since I had been made.

And it turned out so so much better this way.

Response was high. But then, who isn’t in for a bit of harmless fun? Especially when it’s so easy to set up.

Someone had suggested some particular timing: our colleague usually gets to speak early in the meeting and that was going to be our cue to all switch to our virtual background of his soon-worldwide-office.

Act 3

The meeting started as usual and people, who were a bit more numerous than habitual, kept a very straight face. Our colleague was called to speak and that’s when most of the tiles in the gallery instantly changed!

Screenshot of our zoom meeting where everyone (but one person) in the 4 x 5 grid of video feeds uses the same background image. Everyone's face but mine has been replaced by a smiley.
Screenshot of our zoom meeting where everyone (but one person) in the 4 x 5 grid of video feeds uses the same background image. Everyone’s face but mine has been replaced by a smiley.

Everyone yielded to the smiles that had been suppressed and for a few moments none of us heard him. We were too focused on awaiting his reaction. And yet, he continued to talk, unaware, for a few seconds until wrapping up. At the exact moment he briefly paused, hesitated, apparently lost track of his thought and then finished his word, we knew he was finally looking at his screen and he was confused.

Mischief managed!

He was not expecting that, to our delight! Hearing his heartfelt laugh was such a reward. Another bonus was seeing live a number of colleagues who usually don’t share their video in meetings.

I enjoyed immensely seeing a whole room of smiling people.

The weirdest first day of vacation

“Yes, I’ll be working a bit on the project while I’m off because I really dig it!”

Me, massively underestimating “a bit”
In this write-up, I’m attempting the epistolary narrative style that I remember enjoying from Stephen Chbosky’s excellent novel “The perks of being a wallflower”

Dear diary, I slept in this morning \o/, got up and drank two or three cups of espresso while I lazily browsed social media and played a few games on my smartphone. I did yoga a bit before noon, showered, and got ready for the rest of my first day of vacation.

I ate a light lunch standing up in the kitchen as I was transplanting the ferns I collected last Sunday near the lake.

As I pondered which subject I was going to draw later in the day as part of Inktober, I also pondered the oddity of my Apple Watch not recongnising as “stood” the good chunk of the previous hour that I had spent, well… standing. I certainly had been “moving a little” on the account of transplanting ferns not being the kind of activity you can engage in by being immobile.

Memoji-2020-laptop

A quick time-check led me to my desk. I had just enough time to publish a press release.

I drank more espresso, took the dog out for a walk and by then I had a pretty good idea what I was going to draw. I returned to my desk again for a one-hour meeting that lasted three hours /o\ That’s the first massive underestimation of how much time to block for that project (the W3C website redesign).

My brother showed up during my call (much earlier than I anticipated) and as he didn’t have his keys he tried to FaceTime me. I rejected the call, texted him that I was in a meeting, but he responded by texting me that he was outside. So I ran downstairs to let him in, ran back up and continued with my colleagues.

Memoji-2020-shock

The doorbell rang not too long after. I apologised to my colleagues and ran downstairs and outside to pick up a delivery that I expected tomorrow. I dropped the unopened package on the dining table and as I headed back upstairs to my computer, I smiled at my brother. By then he was taking all the space on the sofa, which was fine because the cat doesn’t like the sofa that much.

My valiant colleagues and I had been at it for what seemed like days, and I was aware that each of them had other fish to fry, and yet nobody else was better positioned than them/us to do what we needed to do. Time was passing and it was food o’clock in all of our time zones.

We were done. Rather suddenly —It was the strangest thing! It seemed only moments before that we had gone through two thirds of the exercise and I was agonising (out of shame because I was getting way more of their time than was bargained for, and because my brother was waiting downstairs.)

Memoji-2020-shrug

The completion of our task took us all by surprise! As I quickly thankologised profusely to them, one of my colleagues quipped that he was almost late for second breakfast, another enquired how many breakfasts there were and whether several lunches followed and how many, and the third colleague really looked like he wanted us all to put on more work! So my finger smashed the Zoom button that ended the meeting for all.

It was 8 o’clock. I was thinking that working the equivalent of a half-day during my vacation wasn’t too bad from the point of view of my employer, and I wondered if I had missed the time before which I could still go back on how many days I was really taking.

My brother wanted me to try a particular wine that he likes very much. Opening my package made me happy: my favourite fragrance arrived in two versions: regular and “body mist.” My brother’s wine was very good, he’s right. We sipped it and ate guacamole and chips while the oven heated. I made a nice dinner that didn’t take long to prepare, and we both enjoyed it.

Soon enough we were on the sofa, me drinking espresso and him drinking tea; each talking to each other with interest, him about why some stuff changed at his workplace and me suggesting further areas of optimisation (he will at least explore one idea.) I stood up a few times and “moved a little”, as commanded by my smart watch. He doesn’t mind, he doesn’t think I’m weird.

I grabbed my art book, pencil and ink pen a bit before 11 o’clock. Today’s Inktober prompt is “sleep” and I was going to draw a newborn sleeping next to his daddy’s chest. My brother commented that the photo I used as reference was too detailed, and he may be right, but I had a good feeling about it and told him I was trying a minute or two before giving up. My feeling was indeed right, and my brother was surprised when I was finished, because I finished earlier than he anticipated, and the drawing was pretty good.

Memoji-2020-party

Eventually, my brother left. It was 2 am. We had spent a lovely evening together. It had been a nice break from work but I was keen on finishing where I left off, out of duty because of the timeline that was agreed on.

The time tracker on my computer started logging a new day at 5 am. I was done right after 6. Whew! This was the second massive underestimation of how much time to block for that project. But now the people we work with can do their part and hopefully we will all meet the deadline in two days.

As I stood at my window, sipping espresso and watching the sky going from really dark to some sort of hesitant but unmistakable glow, I observed that it’s a whole day of vacation I could have written off.