Teleworking has improved our digital skills
For 43% of employees who have moved to the home office, the experience has resulted in the use (and therefore better control) of new software. A LISER study was able to quantify this increase in skills.
Patrick JACQUEMOT
For 43% of employees who have moved to the home office, the experience has resulted in the use (and therefore better control) of new software. A LISER study was able to quantify this increase in skills.
The use of telework remains to be favored. Now is not the time to return to the office, and the remote working experience certainly still has a bright future ahead. And while it will undoubtedly be necessary to look at the benefits and harms of this form of organization, LISER has chosen to examine its influence on the mastery of digital tools for the employees concerned. There, undoubtedly, there is better.
It is true that for many employees it was necessary to adapt quickly after having been launched into teleworking for the first time in the spring of 2019. Researchers from the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research have thus determined that On average, teleworkers used a little more than 4 types of digital tools. Main beneficiaries: videoconferencing tools, instant messaging and collaborative tools for sharing documents or managing workflows (groupware or workflow type).
Unsurprisingly, economists Laetitia Hauret and Ludivine Martin analyze, “it is the tools aimed at compensating for the lack of face-to-face relationships that have seen their share of users increase”. Thus, 88% of teleworkers used videoconferencing tools and 81% instant messaging tools. Much larger proportions than in ordinary activity before the first containment measures promulgated in March 2020.
And if today these practices have become part of professional mores, the responses collected from 438 employees show that for two teleworkers in five (43% precisely), this was a discovery. Among the teleworkers who have experimented with these new digital tools, 50% used videoconferencing, for example, while they did not do it before, 40% have taken over workflow management tools (of the workflow type) and 37% now use instant messaging when the function was still unknown to them a few months ago.
The highlighting of these “discoveries” of digital-tools is not surprising if we remember that last spring 83% of people who worked from home did their first steps in remote work, away from the office, away from colleagues. Statec had quantified at 69% the overall share of employees in Luxembourg who had to comply with teleworking.
If the home office experience has changed the lives of companies and employees and required an adaptation of the legal framework, it has also turned out to be a great training opportunity. Training, on the job or supervised, but which in the end has borne fruit since 30% of teleworkers believe that their digital skills have increased during containment. Only 2% of people surveyed believe they have seen their digital skills decline.
If, just yesterday, recruiters struggled to find profiles with digital skills, the health crisis may have changed the situation. Mastery of digital tools is the second “hard skills” among the qualities sought in job offers in the Grand Duchy.
