With the advantage of time, reading old reports (that is, from four years ago) about teleworking in Spain seems an almost endearing exercise. In 2019, the Active Population Survey said it had gone from 4.3% to 4.8%. In other words, everyone had a friend whose company let them stay home on Fridays or occasionally. Then came March 14, 2020, Day 1 of the New Era. With the confinement due to covid just decreed, companies and organizations of all kinds entered, overnight and without any prior preparation, into an unknown dimension, which consisted of everyone working from home, helped almost always for those tools unknown to many until then, called Zoom, Teams and Slack.
They were days of some chaos and learning new protocols. In general, 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 telecommuters rose to 34%, according to IvieLab, the Valencian Institute for Economic Research. And the situation remained stable for more or less the whole year until, with vaccines and the pandemic in a state of relative control, the moment came for the great retrenchment: while a few large multinationals and firms foreign countries received news of the death of the office – companies almost always in the technology sector such as Reddit or Spotify became 100% remote and sold their headquarters -, in Spain many employers again demanded full or almost full presence to some employees who in many cases had already gotten used to the advantages of remote work, among which there is the saving of time and money in transfers and the facilities for conciliation.
The result, when just three years have passed since the implementation of teleworking, is that the possibility of working from home has become a workhorse in many companies, an issue that divides committees with managers, almost simultaneously with wages, and also in a bargaining weapon or a competitive advantage between companies. That is to say, 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 another type of compensation in return.
According to data provided yesterday by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, telework was reduced throughout 2022. Occasional work went from 13.6% to 12.5% ??and usual (more of half the days worked), from 7.9 to 6.4%. Even in the communities where it is practiced the most, because they have more economic activities that allow it, such as Madrid (19.1% of workers have some flexibility) and Catalonia (14.1%), they are far from European territories such as the Netherlands, where the incidence exceeds 54%.
“The data from the EPA (Active Population Survey) show a very significant decline in the last year”, confirms Cristina Torre, secretary of trade union action and fair transitions of CCOO in Catalonia. “We find that companies prefer to grant flexibility, that is, a possibility to work remotely less than 30% of the time. We have a company mentality in which the correct distribution of work is replaced by presenteeism”.
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 contrary, the so-called mouse movers or mouse jigglers (mouse jigglers), the systems that employees 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 last year the concept of “productivity paranoia”, after carrying out an internal report among its employees.
“My boss was so reluctant to telework that he preferred that I leave the company rather than allow me to work from home, despite the fact that I had a report from my psychiatrist recommending it for anxiety reasons,” he explains CC. (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 a return to the office in June 2020. Finally, she left the company.
“The question of telecommuting now always comes up during the first conversation with a candidate, four years ago it wasn’t even discussed, or only in companies in the digital field”, explains Esther Lozano, talent hunter at Zinettica, who is dedicated to select management personnel and intermediate commands. Does a company that, due to its organizational policy, prefers attendance must compensate the employee by paying him more? In some cases, yes. “Everything adds up”, assures Lozano. “What is most valued is flexibility and working conditions. And in some 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 Merida 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 work, two of remote work), but for a few months they have switched to 2 3 due to “the rise in fuel prices and inflation”.
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 of Yolanda Díaz approved the Telework law, which established that, to be considered telework, the non-present day must exceed 30%, that it is always reversible and voluntary and that the expenses and the means are put by the employer. All this is being fulfilled half-heartedly, says Torre: many employees are paying for the equipment and the costs of electricity, Wi-Fi network and supplies. In addition, he points out that “what cannot happen with telecommuting is the same thing that already happened with reductions in working hours, which since they are mostly requested by women, have become a very real detriment to internal promotion and even in the calculation of pensions.