Alcatel-Lucent France Promotes Telecommuting

Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) announced its subsidiary Alcatel-Lucent France has signed a company-wide agreement to encourage home telecommuting with all the unions present in the company (CFDT, CGT, CFTC, CFE-CGC and FO) — a first-of-its-kind agreement in the industry.

 

Through this agreement, employees across various units and sites of Alcatel-Lucent France will be able to work from their home, one or two days a week. However, to be eligible for this, they should offer their consent to do so and prove that their activity is within the purview of telecommuting eligibility. Additionally, the agreement will ensure that every telecommuting employee of a company turns into a representative of his/her own Alcatel-Lucent products and solutions, including collaborative enterprise applications.

 

“As a world leader of broadband technologies, Alcatel-Lucent wanted to contribute to new ways of working by developing telecommuting initiatives. In 2007, a workgroup and studies associating unions and occupational physicians provided an indication of the impact of telecommuting on the organization of teams and their productivity. Today, nearly 500 employees based in the Paris area are already trialing telecommuting one to two days per week,’’ explained Jean-Christophe Giroux, Chief Executive Officer of Alcatel-Lucent France.

 

This agreement has been framed after the company conducted a number of trials since 2003. These trials were carried out in the sites of Vélizy and then Villarceaux, near Paris. The model will be gradually implemented by the company throughout 2008 across other sites in France.

 

The company’s agreement is in line with the inter-professional agreement on telecommuting, which was framed at the European level on July 16, 2002 and included in the French law by virtue of the national inter-professional agreement of July 19, 2005.

Broadband technologies have changed the way people work. Now, employees across a wide array of industry sectors are able to strike the right balance between their work and personal life. The idea of home telecommuting has been a product of Alcatel-Lucent’s activities supporting sustainable development. These include the reduction of pollutants, which can be achieved by limiting employee travel.