Teleworking in France: BoursoBank and Revolut maintain the trend

Teleworking remains firmly established in France

The trend looks set to continue in France.

Could teleworking really be heading for a major reversal? Following the growth seen during the Covid period, several large French companies, including Société Générale, Stellantis and Ubisoft, have chosen to limit the practice. Yet these widely reported examples do not appear to reflect the broader picture, according to a survey of 1,000 French companies published on Thursday 12 March by the Association for the Employment of Executives (Apec) and reported by Les Échos.

The research found that just 5% of businesses had scaled back remote working. Among companies employing executives, 9% had decided to reconsider teleworking, while 89% had made no changes and 2% had strengthened the arrangement even further.

More revealingly, Apec subsequently surveyed executives. Since 2024, the share who would be very dissatisfied if their employer challenged this entitlement has risen from 69% to 74%. If this were to happen, 29% of respondents would even look to leave their company. It is likely to be a message employers will hear, helping to explain why management teams are proceeding cautiously on the issue.

Companies where teleworking is strongly supported

The findings are not especially surprising. We recently discussed BoursoBank, for example. Although it is a Société Générale subsidiary, whose parent company has reconsidered remote working, half of BoursoBank’s teams - project and support functions, representing around 500 people - attend the office three days a week. The other half, working in customer relations and operations processing, work from home 90% of the time. This approach has enabled the neobank to widen its recruitment pool.

Revolut’s hybrid teleworking model

Revolut provides another example. Having adopted fully remote working during the Covid pandemic in 2020, it moved to a hybrid structure from 2021. Put simply, employees who want to can work from the office.

There is no intention, however, of questioning the progress already made. As an executive at the online bank explained: “At Revolut, working remotely is the norm; coming into the office is the exception.” Further information on the subject is available in our previous article here.