Does telework affect the control/trust nexus? A case study in the social protection sector[Le télétravail a-t-il transformé le rapport contrôle-confiance ? Une étude de cas dans le secteur de la protection sociale]

While it is accepted that teleworking challenges traditional management fundamentals such as visibility and presence, the impact of these changes on managerial practices remains uncertain. While some observers fear increased monitoring, others call for the development of a culture of trust. However, this way of questioning the impact of teleworking reflects a substitution perspective in which monitoring and trust are mutually exclusive. However, a complementary perspective is also possible, considering that control and trust co-exist and, under certain conditions, even reinforce each other. According to this approach, teleworking should not eliminate one in favour of the other, but rather impact the way in which control and trust interact. Studying the impact of teleworking on managerial practices provides an opportunity to advance the debate between substitution and complementary perspectives to the control-trust relationship. More specifically, it should help determine whether managers have changed their existing practices for managing teleworkers and what effects these changes – or lack thereof – have had on employee performance and health. To explore these issues, a study was conducted within a medium-sized social protection organisation (400 employees) located in the Paris region. This organisation is unique in that it rolled out teleworking on an experimental basis in 2017, made it widespread in 2020, and, starting in 2022, granted almost all of its employees the option of teleworking three days a week. The study is based on an analysis of the different versions of the teleworking agreement between 2017 and 2022, as well as 50 semi-structured individual interviews with managers and their employees. The results show, first and foremost, that changes in teleworking agreements over the years reflect a growing level of trust in teleworkers, counterbalanced by additional rules that limit their freedom and serve as safeguards. Analysis of the data collected through interviews also makes it possible to draw up an inventory of the control and trust practices applied by managers to manage teleworking. Overall, it appears that these practices, although they underwent significant adjustments to manage forced and widespread teleworking during the lockdown periods of 2020 and 2021, have since returned to a state similar to what existed when work was only done on site, despite the introduction of new IT tools offering new control possibilities. The study also documents and analyses three types of relationship between these control and trust practices: substitutive, antinomic and synergistic. A striking fact is that when trust grows, although controls decrease in line with the substitutive approach, they never disappear completely. Ultimately, a certain balance between control and trust is recognised and appreciated by managers and the vast majority of employees. The results also show that the teleworking management adopted by the organisation and its managers had generally positive effects on employee performance and health. These results are discussed in order to understand how the presence of controls can be considered consistent with trust practices and thus not undermine either employee commitment or the quality of their relationship with their managers. While the notion of configuration linking controls to trust practices is put forward as an explanation, our data mainly highlight the existence of a complementary relationship between control and trust. We show that this relationship is based both on the nature of trust, which is necessarily limited, and on the acceptance of controls by those who apply them and those to whom they are applied. Recognising the principle of limited trust still leaves the choice of where to set these limits. We discuss the limits set by the organisation and examine how they could be pushed back to allow more room for trust, and therefore more freedom for teleworkers, without jeopardising performance. These considerations lead to several practical implications from the study, which encourage companies to favour a flexible approach to managing remote working, promoting ‘framed' trust based on fair treatment and combining performance, well-being and health issues at work.