“The Swiss are a little less macaque than the French”
Paleoanthropologist Pascal Picq uses monkeys to shed light on the shift to telework that the pandemic has fostered. Evolution or revolution?
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“We will have to think about the tasks requiring the most to be together and those that can be fulfilled remotely, with a management that trusts and delegates” and therefore copy the functioning of chimpanzees with an “agile methods” of business management.
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When we think about telecommuting, we don’t spontaneously say to ourselves that apes and great apes could enlighten us. Hence the astonishment aroused by “Chimpanzees and teleworking”, a book in which the famous paleoanthropologist Pascal Picq takes a Darwinian look at the business world.
Do chimpanzees have things to teach us about the organization of work?
The chimpanzee societies have a very flexible and efficient social organization. These are so-called fusion-fission societies: we get together for high-quality interactions, social, emotional or other, and we disperse for more prosaic tasks that do not need to be numerous. We too have this kind of behavior: what prevails in ape and ape societies also prevails in human societies and in business. We therefore wonder how to achieve more forms of remote work while maintaining team cohesion for highly qualitative tasks on a professional level. And how to define also the tasks to be carried out in small groups or alone. But don’t panic, we know how to do that! It is rather a question of knowing how to get there according to the cultural biases specific to each country. In this regard, England is open, Switzerland very diverse and France still very hierarchical. The management remains vertical and face-to-face: the French are very macaque.
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