In an e-mail sent to his team, Elon Musk recently asked his TESLA employees to spend a minimum of 40 hours a week in the office, on pain of immediate dismissal...Did you say "absurd" in a world where telecommuting has become the norm?

And yet, some people are understandably concerned about this organizational model: loss of control, changes in internal working practices, new management methods... But despite these new challenges I recently shared with you why telecommuting 90% of the time is good for NUMA and could be good for you.

Important disclaimer: we're a small company, but this may inspire you. Apart from the logistical complexity, I'm convinced that the fundamentals remain valid, at least for a service company.

At NUMA, there are in fact 3 major prerequisites - important in my opinion - that have led us to adopt this model in 2021:

• The team. We've had excellent feedback on telecommuting during confinement: the pro-personal balance it enabled them to find, the rituals put in place, the new-found efficiency... So why "force" a return to the office? It seemed downright counter-intuitive.
• NUMA's good economic performance: We had found our product-market fit with offer workshopsoffer, the team was stable, and sales and quality performances were good. The switch to the 90-10 model even enabled us to increase efficiency, from 488 workshops delivered in Q1 2022 to 103 in Q3 2020, while continuing to improve quality.

• The nature of our business. NUMA is a digital school for managers and leaders: we offer our customers, large groups, ETIs and scale-ups 2-hour virtual classes led by our Academy coaches to train their managers. And how can we advocate the effectiveness of the 100% digital format, if we don't apply this way of working internally ourselves? Apple employees, scandalized by the management team's forced return to face-to-face training, rightly refer to this hypocrisy in their their petition "How can we understand what problems of remote work need solving in our products, if we don't live it?"

So yes, those are 3 good reasons ... but it's easier said than done - even for a company of 35 people. We did it, addressing the challenges one by one: listening to employees who are less comfortable with this way of working, adapting our habits, while reinforcing the company culture.

So how did we go about setting up this organization? What were the key factors that made it work today? What's next?

We've done it: switch to the 90-10 model in 5 steps.

#1: Surveying teams

The switch to telecommuting can have a kiss-cool effect: at first, employees love it because it allows them to rediscover a pro-personal balance and no longer be interrupted when they want to work hard on a subject. But sometimes, they realize that they miss going into the office and catching up with their colleagues at the coffee machine. So how do we know if they're planning to stay in a mostly telecommuting organization?

During the confinement period, we set up a monthly survey to gauge how NUMANs felt about telecommuting and, above all, to track how their feelings evolved over the months.

Double win: employees really feel listened to about the impact of telecommuting, and the management team can gauge whether the team would enjoy and perform well in such an organization, while imagining new work practices that meet their expectations and problems (cf. the question about informal exchanges around the coffee machine, which is a real subject!).

#2: Observe the facts

Almost two years ago, NUMANs were given the choice of whether or not to come and work in the office for a month and a half. This was an opportunity to observe whether, when given the choice, they came to the office or not.

As a result, Thursday proved to be a preferred day for employees to meet up at the office, in more or less large groups. But on the other 4 days of the week, employees prefer to work from home.

#3: Stay consistent with our raison d'être

NUMA's mission is to accelerate the emergence of a new generation of leaders through essential skills training. I'm firmly convinced that knowing how to work, collaborate and manage in hybrid mode will be essential skills in a post-covid world. By switching to the 90-10 model, NUMANs have become players in this laboratory of new work practices, constantly experimenting and testing them (even before they are integrated into our workshops!).

#4: Putin place the resources and tools to support the model

Come into the office once a week, twice a week, a month...? I talked about this in my previous articleThe Russian roulette of telecommuting could have landed on any number. We chose 2 days a month. But how? With or without an office? And what about employees who take advantage of this organization to move?

As with the face-to-face versus remote debate, we left it up to employees to define how they wanted to use their telecommuting time: we chose offices that could accommodate around 20 employees simultaneously. Big enough to accommodate employees who want to come into the office outside the 2 collective days. But also large enough to accommodate the 40 or so employees all gathered for the NUMA Days, subject to the reservation of a few extra meeting rooms. To achieve this flexibility, a co-working space was the best solution for us, rather than renting our own offices.  

The other challenge was to continue offering access to good working conditions, even at home:

• NUMA provides workstation equipment: chairs, screen risers, etc.
• NUMA provides access to local co-working facilities for employees living far from Paris.

"Going to a co-working space allows me to continue to maintain my network, particularly as Head of Sales, to open up to new practices, tools and processes, as I used to do in Paris. "Marjolaine Sala, Head of Sales & Operations, remote from Bordeaux          

#5: define and communicate the values and behaviors expected in this new organization

Before fully embarking on this new way of working, it was key for us to clearly define the framework of values and behavior expected to make it work.

The framework of values and behaviours shared with NUMANs during our transition to the 90-10 model

Telecommuting creates freedom to work, and therefore a host of special cases/working arrangements that must not hinder either business or the collective.

We formalized these behaviors and values in our teleworking guide, which we communicated to the whole team as a reference document.

An example of a special case induced by our model and the framework we ask NUMANs to respect

So how do we go about it?

1. Rethinking our rituals to make them hybrid-first

To move our rituals into hybrid mode, we identified 3 major challenges:

• Be inclusive: so that NUMANs feel involved and concerned, whether in the office or remotely, in Paris or the provinces.
• Be transparent: use these moments to pass on isolated information, to make small, invisible subjects visible. The aim here is not to address strategic or financial issues - which of course need to be included - but to seek out, isolate and popularize the day-to-day by providing keys to understanding, especially in a context of widespread telecommuting, which increases inequalities of access to this "micro-information".
• Giving energy: it's almost impossible to recreate the energy of the office from a distance, but we try to get close to it by sharing the week's highlights and information about our upcoming collective events (NUMA days, seminars...).

In our collective rituals, and especially in Weekly kick-offs, we try to address these 3 challenges as best we can, for example by giving the floor in turn to members of different teams who share a project, a win, a learning experience. Collectively, we share information that may seem minor (which we'd typically hear at the coffee machine if we were face-to-face), but which may in fact enable the team to better understand our market or business.

2. Manage business rather than people

Telecommuting doesn't demand more control, on the contrary, it gives you more responsibility: managing your priorities, your schedule, being clear with others to ensure smooth communication...

But for that, it's key as an organization to create the right framework so that employees can put their energy in the right place, and the management team can focus on driving the business, not micro-managing people.

At NUMA, we have put in place two main elements to create this mix of alignment and empowerment:

• OKRs (Objectives & Key Results): they set the course for each quarter, with the main priorities and the means to achieve them. Each Key Result is steered by a member of the team (not necessarily a manager!). They are presented to NUMANs at the start of each quarter and updated every month.
• Airtable: this no-code tool enables us to monitor our performance in real time (volume of workshops, participants, coach staffing) and to keep an eye on the quality of our workshops thanks to participant ratings. In the interests of transparency, this data is accessible to all employees, and Slack-bots notify them when a piece of information comes in, such as an end-of-workshop evaluation.

3. Keep experimenting and, above all, dare to stop what isn't working.

Strategy and organization are evolving at the same pace as NUMA, and our working practices must keep pace with these changes (by the way, I recommend the excellent article the excellent article by Udemy's Chief Learning Officer). For example, for several months we tested the lunch & learn format, during which a team member shares his or her experience of a project and what he or she has learned from it. At first, this ritual was useful for smoothing out the transmission of information and promoting transparency, but as it was energy-consuming for the organizer and less and less popular, we ended up stopping it. In this way, we ensure that we always drive by value.

Shall we take stock?

The 90-10 model has been in effect at NUMA since January 2021, and what I observe 1.5 years later is that NUMA is today a healthy, fluid work organization with a culture of extreme transparency that is assumed and cultivated. But also thanks to a simple corporate strategy that leaves little room for misinterpretation or loss of focus for the teams.

The way in which this model has been deployed has a lot to do with it. In my opinion, the major success factors in implementing the model were :

• Alignment between different managers
• Co-construction with employees, particularly during the survey phase
• Our bias towards flexibility, both in terms of the choice of office and the number of days spent at TT, which is ultimately up to the individual.
• No discrimination for those who decide not to live in Paris. We don't see the telecommuting debate as the real issue: how can we have a more motivated team that will perform collectively and individually? And if for some that means living in Bordeaux, Marseille or elsewhere, then there's no reason to cut their salary by 20% (as has been done in far too many companies).

"Without such an organizational model, I would never have been able to find such a stimulating job the Toulon job market being what it is. Our working model allows me to live in the city I want, while having the job and missions that thrill me, it removes any geographical limits to the development of my career!" - Alice Rogier, Project Manager at NUMA, remote from Toulon

And of course, this process worked in part because we're a 35-person organization. I'd be curious to know what processes larger companies like Airbnb or Criteo have followed.

No organization is perfect, so of course we ask ourselves questions about what's next, to improve our model and make it more efficient, healthier and more humane. For example:

• What's the best format for NUMA Days? Today, NUMA Days are mini-seminars, and their organization mobilizes one member of the team for at least a day and a half.
• And how do you manage it if the teams need to meet more often, both in Paris and in the provinces, where we could eventually create NUMAN clusters?
• Will our work organization still work when we're 70? What will we have to change to make it work?
• Is 2 days a month a good rhythm? What about doing 1 week all together every 2 months, for example? When would it be a good idea to review our rhythm?
• What form will our offices take as these new uses emerge? For example, reducing the number of workstations and renting a large space just for NUMA Days?

The key to any model is to constantly question our practices. We mustn't be attached to the status quo, or nostalgic for yesterday's practices, and we mustn't rush to test all the practices we see on Linkedin or in management manuals that are often far removed from our realities. A good way to do this is to always ask yourself:

• What could be better?
• What value would there be in doing otherwise?
• Would this practice be relevant to my organization? What could it enable us to do better?