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4 BENEFITS FOR EMPLOYEES The benefits of teleworking are primarily significant for employees in numerous ways. These different experiences have revealed an impressive list of advantages for employees: • The improved overall quality of life, with the opportunity to spend more time with loved ones • Elimination of travel time and associated daily stress (rush hour, traffic jams, etc.) • Increased time for relaxation and leisure • Possibility of moving to sunnier regions to enjoy a more relaxed lifestyle • Chance to improve one's daily lifestyle by relocating to areas where the cost of housing is much lower than that in larger metropolitan cities (some employees have, for example, left the San Francisco area because of its high rentals) • Harmonious balance in the distribution of household chores, which are spread out over the day and thus allow better sleep • The opportunity to accompany one's spouse without having to find a new job BENEFITS FOR COMPANIES Employees are not the only winners in this process of work nomadisation. Contrary to what one might think at first impression, companies have also been able to benefit from the numerous advantages offered by this transformation, foremost among which are: • Improved productivity and increased employee engagement daily • Reduced workspace and therefore lower real estate costs • A wider pool of potential talent, no longer limited to the local community, which makes it possible to find the most competent employees, especially for niche jobs • A reduction in the company's attrition rate 5 , resulting in a much higher employee retention factor, thus avoiding the brain drain (to emerging countries, for example) • Happier employees enhance the company's image (the USPTO was voted best company to work for in a federal government survey), making it easier to attract new talent More generally, the WFA also has benefits for the community . The relative exodus of employees from large urban centres helps to reinvigorate some of the more rural areas and, in the long term, to increase the supply of public services in these regions (schools, railway stations, shops, leisure activities, sports activities). This migration can contribute to the development of a new peri-urban or even rural social fabric. The WFA also has a positive influence on the environment by eliminating millions of daily journeys . It means fewer kilometres travelled and reduced CO2 emissions. 5 In HR, attrition rate refers to the percentage of employees exiting an organisation over a given period. It is thus opposite of the employee retention rate.
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5 MACHINES AT THE SERVICE OF HUMANS The next few decades should prove that the potential of technology at work is still under- utilised. The deployment of 5G (before 6G), an exponential increase in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and the development of connected machines (especially voice assistants) will increase the number of exchanges between man and machine. Notwithstanding a few stuttering implementations, all these evolutions will eventually greatly facilitate the daily life of employees wherever they may be. For example, assisted management of diaries and appointments, automated note-taking, automatic display of documents during a presentation, easier monitoring of customer relations, etc. Machine assistance will help to make tasks more efficient and improve productivity. Artificial intelligence will also be accompanied by automatic machine learning through experience, which, by anticipating behaviour with the help of predictive algorithms, will enable employees to save precious time . Voice assistants, connected glasses or virtual reality headsets, although appearing futuristic today, will eventually offer the possibility of benefiting from a panoply of digital tools to work in the most optimal conditions, meet remotely and access all the necessary documents from anywhere. In the office, employee comfort will be optimised through intelligent buildings that will automatically regulate temperature and air quality according to the number of people in the room. AUTOMATION AND ROBOTISATION Automation and robotisation, in turn, will eliminate many time-consuming and repetitive operational tasks, especially within the factory floor (first-level tasks). As a result, productivity is expected to improve continuously. Worker safety is expected to be enhanced by eliminating the most strenuous and dangerous tasks. On the other hand, this will mean that many outdated and relatively useless workplaces will have to be redesigned. Simple execution tasks, now carried out by machines, will be replaced by quality control and production monitoring tasks that rely more on analysis, self-determination and situational intelligence. Indeed, around 20 million industrial jobs (or 8.5%) are expected to disappear worldwide by 2030. At the same time, it is estimated that 85% of the jobs filled in 2030 6 have not yet been invented 7 . 6 Oxford Economics Study, How robots change the world, 2019 7 Dell Technologies, The impact of emerging technologies on Society & Work in 2030, 2017
