After a rich career in the senior civil service and the management of large groups – La Poste, La Banque Populaire, Orange, etc. -, Bruno Mettling founded the firm Topics in 2016, which advises companies on their HR strategy.
The Express: Does France have a problem with work?
Bruno Mettling: The transformation of work, and no longer just the issue of employment, has again become a central theme of public debate and concerns in companies. This is good news, because we have finally understood that the relationship to work is changing at breakneck speed. One sign, among others: I recently worked with the store managers of a large distribution network. Usually, my interlocutors are rather general management and human resources. But this sign wanted to go into short circuit and give, live, to its bosses in the field the keys to understanding what is going on in the minds of young people today. Why do some of them not show up on the first day of their CDI? Or quit after a month? How can the HRDs, who run from one emergency to another, deal with this accelerating turnover?
In many clubs, we fight today to recruit and if possible attract the best, by putting a lot of resources into it. And at the same time, departures follow one another, the retention rate drops. It’s a washing machine. We calculated the cost of this Danaïdes barrel for the international company where we were working. It is colossal and amounts to tens of millions of euros per year. Hence the importance, at some point, of asking oneself and thinking seriously about the issue of commitment in the company.
To put France back to work, we must analyze these new sources of motivation and get out of the patterns that previous generations, who are often in charge, continue to apply. In other words, giving meaning back to work.
It’s a portmanteau, isn’t it? There are as many meanings as individuals…
Exactly. We hear great speeches on the meaning of the company, its mission. It’s good. But that is not what motivates employee engagement. We have to go back to a daily logic: what is my job for? What is my contribution? In large groups, increasingly matrix-based organization charts scatter the professions: finance shared between Europe and Asia, production largely in Asia, IT in India, etc. Because of this geographical or functional fragmentation, many employees lose the purpose of their work. When I see what I’m doing, when I can measure my impact, that of my team, and make the link with the strategy the boss of the box talked about, I’m much more committed. Pardon me for recalling it, but it is fundamental.
The other danger that threatens commitment is bureaucracy. A great hope was born during the Covid: according to the confinements, the companies showed an incredible agility. Overnight, we saw the layers of reporting and internal control disappear. Employees have gained autonomy, they have given, or received, confidence.
Unfortunately, since life has resumed a normal course, we are witnessing the great return of this bureaucracy. Employees feel that their daily lives are increasingly constrained by ancillary and unproductive tasks. As for managers, who are exhausted filling in dashboards, they are chomping at the bit. My firm recently conducted a survey of large companies. To the question “If you had the choice today, would you be ready to give up your management role?”, 51% of managers answered yes. This is a very worrying indicator. However, the relationship with his boss is a key element in a young person’s desire to stay, or to leave. You know the adage: “You join a company, you leave a manager.”
What can be done to give chefs the desire to “chef” again?
First, do not reproduce the mistakes of the past when choosing them. I was HRD, especially in the bank, and we made mistakes in the 2000s, by linking promotion to holding a position of branch manager. Excellent business advisers who actually loved the customers, the savings products, found themselves in this position and dried out from having to manage schedules and reporting. Our generation grew up thinking that becoming a manager was an accomplishment. Today, this is no longer the Holy Grail for many young people. Because taking responsibility is often seen only through the prism of the tensions that accompany it. Manager is a skill in its own right, more and more complicated to exercise, and for which there are fewer and fewer candidates.
Added to this is another generational effect: young employees are increasingly demanding personalized careers, within a framework that must obviously remain collective, because there cannot be as many working arrangements as there are of collaborators. This is the great challenge for the HR function: to make this framework more flexible to enable managers to respond to this aspiration, while collectively guaranteeing fairness and operational consistency in the company.
This request is completely new. Historically, HR was there to negotiate with the social partners a uniform framework that applied to everyone. However, young people ardently wish that their individual case be taken into consideration. Marketing has understood this for fifteen or twenty years. In many sectors, the customer has the impression that he is considered as an individual, even though he is only a profile, a “persona”, defined by the marketing department. HR continues to work monolithically.
Fortunately, not all of them. I recently met the HRD of McDonald’s and I asked him about his recruitment difficulties, which I imagined to be significant. “Not at all, he replied. We continue to receive 50,000 CVs a year. For a simple reason: our slogan ‘Come as you are’, we apply it to our employees.” At McDo, there are tens of thousands of different working time regimes! For what ? Because one of the great pools of the brand are the students. And that the schedule at McDo must adapt to the courses. Hence the tremendous agility of the HR system, which offers infinite flexibility in the management of schedules, while ensuring pay equity, with compensation based on schedules.
In front of labor shortage in some professions, recruiters seem to be rediscovering the virtues of internal training. It was time ?
This is essential, if only to respond to the limitations of the initial training system. Take digital: there are not enough graduates per year to meet the needs, it would take three or four times more, and everyone is snapping up experts in cybersecurity, cloud or data…
The Topics team, in association with Télécom Paris, regularly meets the IT directors of large companies to give them the following speech: “Your IT specialists, who are 40, 45 years old, master 50% or 60% of the skills you need for these new professions. They are mathematicians, they have developed at some point in their lives. The challenge is to embark them on these new professions, in return for a significant investment in terms of training, with the key a valuable certificate or diploma.” The “reskilling”, as we say in bad French. And it works very well. Because the economic equation works: given the levels of remuneration of these populations, it is better to invest 15,000 or 20,000 euros and train for twelve months an employee who gradually loses his employability rather than limiting himself to the race for Wage shallot with young people who know they are in a position of strength.
For VSEs-SMEs, on the other hand, this is out of reach. Their leaders then turn to the public authorities in the hope of obtaining aid. And they often break their teeth, because the aid for continuing training for employees, the Pro-A device, is only open to people whose level of qualification is lower than Bac + 3. Appointment account: at a time of digital and climatic challenges with which we are confronted, we exclude, by construction, engineers from retraining systems…
Can the company still play on the sensitive chord to retain its troops?
Less and less. The new relationship to work is no longer affective, as it was twenty years ago, but contractual. If an employee is refused an arrangement of his schedules that does not interfere with the collective, the answer is simple: he slows down or he goes. This change is concomitant with another, more positive phenomenon: when I started working in the 1980s, the company was a place of tension in a society that produced solidarity. Today, it is the opposite: it has become one of the poles of stability of a fractured country.
It’s quite amazing to see that in recent major crises – yellow vests, debate on pensions, riots in the suburbs – the company as an entity has never been called into question. Because there is a framework, rules of procedure, a judge who ensures compliance with the law, intermediary bodies that play their role. Public authorities, often tempted to lecture the private sector, would do well to learn from it. Living together in business is, beyond real difficulties, a strong reality in our country.