Telecommuting seems to be becoming more and more important in our society. Working at home, without spending hours in traffic jams or in transport: the advantages of teleworking would be so numerous that in 2009, the Centre d'analyse stratégique predicted that nearly 50% of the active population would be concerned by teleworking in 2015. This estimate is far above reality, even for the most optimistic figures on telework.
The knowledge of telework in France, and its measurement, is based mainly on two surveys:
- The Sumer survey Surveillance médicale des expositions en des salariés aux risques professionnels conducted by the DARES (Direction de l'animation de la recherche, des études et des statistiques du ministère du Travail) now includes questions on the practice of telecommuting and directly measures its practice among all employees based on representative data. The last one was conducted in 2017 and its results published by DARES in November 2019.
- The telework study, conducted by IFOP on behalf of Malakoff Médéric Humanis among 1,604 employees and 401 managers of companies with more than 10 employees in the private sector. Two surveys were conducted, one in 2017, the second in November and December 2018.
3% of employees, 11% of executives according to the DARES
The DARES gives a precise definition of telework: " a form of work organization which designates the fact of using information and communication technologies to carry out, away from the employer's premises, on a regular basis, the work which could have been carried out at the usual workstation" and this in a "voluntary" way.According to the DARES, 3.0% of employees declare to telework at least one day a week. 45% of them telework one day a week, 26% two days a week and 29% three or more days a week.
Regular teleworkers are mainly skilled employees: 61% of them are managers, while the latter represent only 17% of employees. Thus, 11.1% of managers and 3.2% of intermediate professions declare that they telework at least one day a week, whereas this practice is rare among employees and marginal among workers.
Telework is similarly developed in the private and public sectors. Teleworkers in the public sector are concentrated in the state civil service. Telework by managers (16.1%) is even more frequent there than in the private sector (10.8%). Telework is, on the other hand, very little developed in the territorial civil service and almost non-existent in the hospital civil service.
Women and men use regular telework in equal proportions, especially among managers. It is more common among employees aged 30-49 than among older employees (50+) or those under 30, where the proportion of managers is lower. But even among managers, the youngest employees are the ones who telework the least.
The family situation of the employee also influences the use of telework. In the case of employees from single-parent families, 4.0% of them and 4.0% of employees in couples with a child under 3 years of age telework regularly. This phenomenon is accentuated among executives (23.0% of regular teleworkers among executives belonging to a single-parent family) and among executives who are members of a couple raising a child under 3 years old (14.2%).
Telecommuting is more common in the Paris Region (5.5% of employees), especially among executives: one in seven regularly telecommutes there, compared to an average of one in ten in the rest of the country.
In 2017, intense telecommuting (three or more days per week) involved nearly 1% of employees. Of these, women, middle occupations, and private sector employees are slightly overrepresented.
In the restricted field of establishments with more than 10 employees in the private sector (excluding agriculture) in metropolitan France, 4.3% of employees have a telework practice covered by an agreement with their employer. This practice is as often part of a company collective agreement (2.3%) as of an individual agreement between the employee and his/her hierarchy (2.0%).
29% of employees according to the Malakoff-Médéric survey
According to this survey published last February, which uses a broader definition than that of the DARES, the number of teleworkers has increased by 700,000 in one year: it now concerns 29% of private sector employees.While the non-contracted practice remains the majority (21% of employees), the increase comes mainly from the rise in the contracted practice of telecommuting (+50% compared to 2017).
- 51% of teleworkers are managers.
- 49% work in a company with more than 1000 employees.
- 45% work in the service and consulting sector.
- 34% of teleworkers live in the Paris area, and 57% have dependent children. 26% are employees who are caregivers for a dependent or sick person.
- 45% of teleworkers are between 35 and 49 years old.
44% (up from 38% in 2018) of executives say that relaxing the rules for implementing telecommuting will lead them to increase the number of telecommuting recipients within their company, or expand the frequency allowed.
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