With the advantage of time, reading old reports (that is, from four years ago) on teleworking in Spain seems like an almost endearing exercise. In 2019, the Active Population Survey said that it had gone from 4.3% to 4.8%. I mean, everyone had a friend that their company let stay home on Fridays, or once in a while. Then came March 14, 2020, the 1st day of the New Era. With the recently decreed confinement by Covid, companies and organizations of all kinds entered, overnight and without any prior preparation, into an unknown dimension, which consisted of each one working from home, almost always helped of those tools unknown to many until then called Zoom, Teams and Slack.
They were days of certain chaos and learning new protocols. Typically, if the company was not strategic for the state of emergency, it was assumed that productivity would drop until everyone could adjust to the new pace. In the first two months of the pandemic, the incidence of teleworkers rose to 34%, according to data from IvieLab, the Valencian Institute for Economic Research.
The situation remained stable more or less throughout the year until, with the vaccines and the pandemic in a state of relative control, it was time for the great withdrawal: while from a few large multinationals and foreign firms came the news of the death of the office–companies almost always from the technology sector such as Reddit or Spotify became 100% remote and sold their headquarters without looking back–, in Spain many businessmen once again demanded total or almost total attendance from employees who in many cases they had already become accustomed to the advantages of working remotely, including saving time and money in transfers and the facilities for reconciliation.
The result, just three years after the implementation of remote working in the rough and without anesthesia, is that the possibility of working from home has become a labor workhorse in many companies, an issue that divides committees with managers in many places, almost on par with wages, and also a bargaining chip or competitive advantage between companies. In other words, when in doubt, a qualified employee tends to prefer to be in a flexible office and, if the company does not offer it, demands more money or other types of compensation in exchange.
According to data provided yesterday by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, teleworking decreased throughout 2022. Occasional work went from 13.6% to 12.5% and regular work (more than half of the days that work works), from 7.9% to 6.4%. Even the communities where it is practiced the most, because they have more economic activities that allow it, such as Madrid (19.1 of the workers have some flexibility) and Catalonia (14.1%), are very far from European territories such as Countries Bajos, where it exceeds 54% incidence.
"The data from the EPA (Active Population Survey) show a very significant decrease in the last year," confirms Cristina Torre, secretary of union action and just transitions of CCOO in Catalonia. “We find that companies prefer to grant flexibility at most (that is, the possibility of working remotely less than 30% of the time) rather than one or two days a week being able to organize yourself in this way”.
Torre is observing this "distrust" on the part of many employers regarding the performance of their workers, a reluctance to expand that flexibility. “We have a company mentality in which the correct distribution of work is replaced with face-to-face work. That is also a very masculinized pattern, that idea of staying another half hour for the boss to see me, or pretending that you have a lot of work so they don't give you more. That happens when you don't have your work well organized, so logically it's easier for you to go to the employee and change the instructions three times in one morning”.
Torre also refers to the new control systems that have been established for remote employees, both formally and informally, from bossware – software created to monitor the productivity of remote workers' computers – to the opposite, the so-called mouse. movers or mouse jigglers (mouse wigglers), the systems that employees themselves install to show their bosses that they are working all the time even if they are at home. All this technology is part of what Microsoft dubbed "productivity paranoia" last year, after carrying out an internal report among its employees.
“Again, this mistrust of teleworkers comes from the company's lack of organizational capacity. The fact that you are not moving your mouse does not mean that you are idle, you can spend ten minutes doing strategic thinking", affirms the union leader, a feeling that coincides with that of many of those employees who fight for greater flexibility, and who tend to to feel infantilized if it is not granted.
“My boss was so averse to telecommuting that he preferred me to leave the company rather than allow me to work from home, even though he had a report from my psychiatrist recommending it for reasons of anxiety,” explains C.C. (she prefers not to give her full name), an employee who was dedicated to strategy in the humanitarian aid sector. In her case, the organization decreed her return to the office as early as June 2020 and when she, diagnosed with dysthymia (mild depression), raised that possibility, they replied that they would prefer that she request a complete leave than allow her to practice from home, because otherwise the opposite generated a precedent among his peers. Finally, she decided to leave the company herself, she resigned from her permanent contract and began working as a freelancer to maintain that flexibility.
That is also happening: that some workers, in certain sectors, take into account the option of not going to the office as a key factor in accepting or not accepting a position. "The question of teleworking now always arises in the first conversation with a candidate, four years ago it was not even mentioned, or only in certain companies in the digital field," explains Esther Lozano, headhunter for the firm Zinettica, which is dedicated to Select senior management and middle managers.
Does a company that, due to its organizational policy, prefer face-to-face work, have to compensate the employee by paying more? In some cases, yes. "Everything adds up," says Lozano. “What is most valued is flexibility and working conditions. And depending on which highly complex profiles, the compensation is linked to the market situation”.
It also works in reverse, in a positive way: as a way to retain skilled workers. "In Extremadura, as in any rural environment, it is difficult to attract and retain talent and this is a good way," explains David Sánchez, founder of PayPerThink, a "small" strategic innovation company (with 12 employees) based in Mérida. who works for the state administration and for large entities such as ONCE.
After the confinement, they implemented a 3 2 model (three days of face-to-face, two of remote work), but for a few months they have gone to 2 3 due to "the rise in fuel prices and inflation", because for employees it represents a saving not having to travel so many times in their private vehicles. “To have such a specialized team in Extremadura, we have people who come from Mérida, Badajoz, Zafra, Don Benito, Cáceres… all within a radius of about 60 kilometers from the office. If not, we couldn't. Giving flexibility greatly improves the conditions of the competition, which tends to have a less daring leadership”, Sánchez believes.
The public function is perhaps the sector where teleworking has taken root the most. Since April 2021, civil servants can work remotely up to three days a week if their occupation allows it and if it does not interfere with customer service. Different agreements were established depending on the administration and in some it is contemplated, for example, that two days of teleworking cannot be combined with the weekend. Although the draft of the Public Function Law warns that teleworking can be reversible, there are many public employees who have already organized their lives around it.
Like so many other things that changed in 2020, remote work required specific regulation that was also done on the fly. In September 2020, the Ministry led by Yolanda Díaz approved the Teleworking Law, which established that to be considered as such, the non-face-to-face working day must exceed 30%, that this is always reversible and voluntary, and that expenses and means are put businessman. Cristina Torre points out that all of this is being accomplished only partially, since there are many employees who are paying for the equipment and all the costs of electricity, the Wi-Fi network, and other supplies.
"What we recommend -says the union leader- is a collective approach in the company, which is not used as an element of discrimination". Torre also points out that class bias must be taken into account, since many people cannot have adequate housing to telework, and gender bias. "We are aware that women ask for it more, also because the administrative professions, which are more feminized, lend themselves more to flexibility," she affirms, although the data from the Ministry would indicate that this gender gap is closing.
“What cannot happen with teleworking is the same thing that has already happened with reductions in working hours, which by requesting them, especially by women, have become a very real damage in internal promotion and even in the calculation of pensions. In our patriarchal model, face-to-face work is highly valued, the person who spends the most time in the company corridors is promoted first, and we have to be vigilant so that teleworking does not translate into putting on a washing machine, taking care of the child when he gets sick and doing five other things at once.
