Everyone remembers what he was doing on March 20, 2020, when drastic measures were put in place to prevent the covid-19 pandemic from turning into a nightmare, a black plague of the 21st century. Emergency purchase of computer equipment, learning team, zoom and google meet: everyone has become geek – with the exception of front -line workers, forced to go physically to their workplace. In this distanced world, videoconferencing was adopted to see and be seen by his colleagues. Then the health crisis gradually ended, the masks fell, forgotten. However, there remains a “before” and a “after”: five revolutions have turned our relationship to work upside down.
The first is “the upheaval of the balance of power between candidates and recruiters”, underlines Noémie Cicurel, director training and development of Europe at Robert Half. “Some received five to seven proposals per week”. The Covid crisis has indeed put many positions in parentheses and forced to consider unemployment, partial or total. The economic resumption begins in 2021, but without those who resigned, was dismissed, changed work and sometimes regions. The largest world is in its place: around 25 % of employees changed places of residence during the pandemic, a figure that climbs to 35 % among teleworkers, according to human imprint, a firm specializing in promoting quality of life at work.
The situation changes and we discover with amazement a high demand for recruitments on the side of employers. In 2022, at the end of confinement, more than six in ten French people want change and say they are in active research or attentive to new opportunities (Robert Half study, February 2025). “Companies had to ask themselves the question of their attractiveness and the retention of employees,” says Noémie Cicurel. We then speak of “labor shortage” and – not without some reserves – “great resignation”. THE turnover reaches heights. But this crazy parenthesis is over: there are only four out of ten French people in 2024 to imagine leaving their work, a drop of 19 points in two years and 10 points compared to 2023, according to Robert Half, and in 2025, 38 % now favor the safety of employment at salary. A good reflex since only 25 % of recruiters plan to hire on permanent contract this year, compared to 33 % in 2023.
Existential questions
Back to Plan-Plan without risk? Not completely, because the second revolution is that of all those who tasted at work remotely: in 2024, 22 % of private employees have at least one day of telework per month against 4 % in 2019 (INSEE, March 2025). We took a liking to this mode of organization entered into the private sphere, even if the boundaries between private and professional life are blurred. Comfortable but sometimes unhealthy isolation – 41 % of employees consider addictive practices (screens, tobacco, alcohol, etc.) as frequent in telework, or +10 points compared to on -site work (Odoxa/Gae Conseil2020) -, which requires collective. The rebalancing is done with the “hybrid” mixing distancing work (often two days) and face -to -face. A new balance made possible thanks to the third Revolution: forced and accelerated digitalization, creating new needs with digital tools, now essential to daily professional life.
Beyond the evolution of working conditions, the health crisis brought out existential issues: for whom, why and how to work? The quest for meaning has spread to everyone, it is the fourth revolution. “The people who saw their work stop overnight, analyzes Noémie Cicurel. Some today favor a form of precariousness to a permanent contract”. Difficult, in fact, to accept to devote your days to a Bullshit Jobaccording to the expression of the anthropologist David Graeber. So companies have changed their message and their image to a promising “You will help …”. In 2022, 15 % of employees said they were more demanding on the quest for meaning since the health crisis, a figure that rises to 44 % in 2024 (Robert Half).
This quest for meaning is accompanied by the fifth revolution: the balance between professional life and personal life. It even became, in 2024, the first reason for 53 % of employees to stay in their company, before remuneration (ibid). From now on, salary, flexibility, sense of work and personal life balance/personal life shape the choices of employees. If the five revolutions have permanently transformed the world of work, they also strengthened individualization, without a real collective being found, despite the end of the 100 % telework and a progressive return to the office. A new world was born.
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