Anne Thévenet-Abitbol
Director of Foresight and New Concepts
Danone
When you came out of confinement, how did you manage to recreate the interactions so necessary to your 'creative' profession?
My company was very careful to put in place a set of practices designed to protect its employees, limiting the number of staff on site and reducing access to outsiders. As a result, my team and I opted for open-air meetings in which our service providers could participate. I even organised meetings in the courtyard of my building. That's how we got back in touch, and benefited from the 'friction' of each other's personalities, and reconnected with the joy of being together.
What's in it for you?
With teleworking, it's tempting to wonder whether it's so important to go to the office for a meeting when the rest can be done from home. But, quite apart from the fact that we need social interaction, we realise that by being physically in the same place, through informal discussions, we put our finger on problems and solutions that we wouldn't have identified if we'd each been in front of our computers.
Physical presence or teleworking: how are attitudes changing?
It seems to me that since the Covid-19 crisis, there is less rigidity and more understanding. Before, if you saw someone leaving the office at 4 or 5pm, you judged them. Nowadays you hardly notice! Maybe they worked earlier from home, maybe they'll work later from home... For a French society that's very much based on a culture of presence, this is a huge change. We have finally understood that people can work at many different times of the day. They can come to the office to work as a team, and choose to work remotely for meetings or more solitary work.
What do you think the ideal office will look like tomorrow?
An office (a head office) is greater than the sum of its desks (the furniture)! These days, we need to design spaces where people sit down to work, as well as places where they can rub shoulders and meet informally. For me, the ideal office has to fulfil its two missions: on the one hand, to encourage productivity and, on the other, to encourage creativity through exchanges with people who don't necessarily think like you do. It's this second function that the Internet and the new tools allow all too little.
