“With us, like with many others, the Covid served as a revealer”, explains Gervais Pellissier, deputy general manager of Orange, in charge of the transformation of the group. During the pandemic, the company’s employees were forced to improvise on many aspects of their daily lives. “In an emergency, we did not follow the usual procedures for buying masks. Each employee collected theirs and then declared them as an expense report,” he continues. The anecdote may seem trivial, but it symbolizes an awareness in the company, which led to individual questioning. “The isolation and anxiety caused by the Covid crisis have led to questions about everyone’s work“, he analyzes. These questions were multiplied during the crisis. “Many employees have thought about the content of their work, but also about the reason for being of our collective”, adds Gervais Pellissier.
Orange is obviously not the only structure to have been confronted with this general update. AG2R La Mondiale, Crédit Mutuel, Groupe ADP, but also the RATP, or even the SNCF: concerned about the question of meaning, 11 companies with more than 1 million employees met in the Meaning at work collective. “The goal was to develop a method to give meaning to work in companies”, explains its founder, the former senior civil servant Jean-Baptiste Barfety, who now advises companies on the subject. A report was born from these recommendations, carried by Jean-Dominique Senard, president of Renault, and Nicole Notat, former general secretary of the CFDT and founder of Vigeo. Five years after “The company, object of collective interest”, they present 10 recommendations in the form of a manifesto.
Change in relationship to work
These commitments will be unveiled this Thursday, June 22. L’Express had exclusive access to it. The result of 130 interviews carried out over a year with big bosses, employees and academics, its authors start from a question at the heart of contemporary concerns: that of the meaning given to each person’s job. To answer this, the report, entitled “From meaning to work”, explores three levers for companies: that of the purpose given to work, its content and, finally, management.
Thanks to the reduction in unemployment and the rise in recruitment difficulties, they now face a major challenge: that of the working conditions offered. Difficulty, work-life balance, purpose… Elements that are all the more difficult to pin down as they have changed considerably in the minds of the French in recent years. According to an Ifop survey for the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, published in January, 61% of French employees prefer to earn less money but have more free time. By comparison, they were only 38% in 2008. “Our employees aspire to a renewed consideration of the balance between personal and professional time. This has led us to ask ourselves questions about the four-day week, about shifts …, list Jean Agulhon, HRD of the RATP group. We also seek to help people to emancipate themselves in their work.”
“Live my life”
According to an OpinionWay study, published in June 2022, 43% of working people are thinking of leaving their job, in order to find one “with more meaning”. The proportion is particularly marked among managers (52%) and the youngest (59% of those under 35). If all employees do not cross the Rubicon, the desire elsewhere can lead to a form of disengagement. “There are other ways to disinvest from your work without leaving it, confirms to L’Express the HRD of a large company. We have, for example, observed an increase in absenteeism, but also a difference in greater and greater between the work demanded and the actual work.”
Among the symptoms of this disengagement, the report identifies several levels. “Intrinsic”, first, linked to the content of the work. In the interviews carried out, the people interviewed raised the problem of the accumulation of daunting tasks, the meaning of which they struggled to understand. An employee who does not see the end product of his work and does not understand the purpose of a task is more likely to be demotivated. “In general, the more we perceive what we produce and what we work for, the easier it is to find meaning, notes Gervais Pellissier, from Orange. We regularly offer ‘live my life’ experiences. Employees working, for example, in administration go into contact with customers.
Lack of dialogue
A way to reconnect with the purpose of the company, but also to open up to other skills. The report “From meaning to work” advises companies to allow everyone “to progress and respond effectively to professional challenges”. Apprenticeship and training should be given more importance in interviews, with employees mentioning the need for “[se] renew, even [se] exceed in [leur] work to find meaning in it”. The personal dimension is crucial: the interviewees insisted on their desire to progress, but also on their need for exchange and recognition, in particular from their superiors.
In this context, the development of telework has often come at the expense of communication. “My work still fascinates me, but the global environment has deteriorated sharply, deplores an employee quoted in the report. With teleworking, the team is never reunited again, my hierarchy is satellite, there is no ‘prioritization’ of top management, which is of course very demanding.” This evil is not only French: a global study carried out by Microsoft reveals that only 31% of employees believe that they have received clear advice from their managers face to face, while 81% need help to prioritize their daily tasks. Information does not seem to flow in the opposite direction either, with less than half of employees (43%) saying their company asks for their views at least once a year.
Exemplary
The need for dialogue, in one direction or another, is crying out. But it is hampered, while managers, the main transmission belts for employees’ questions, are often more concerned with administrative tasks than with human management. “The manager spends too much time filling in Excel tables, lack of time to maintain relations with his collaborators”, despairs an employee quoted. The obsession with “reporting”, first thought to increase the productivity of teams, seems to have turned against the company. “Managers spend a lot of time on the past – the reporting – and the future – the medium-term plans –, but not enough on the present, that is to say human relations, schematizes Jean Agulhon, of the RATP. We know that what makes a good manager is his ability to be present with his team, on a daily basis, sometimes deploying a close relationship, striving to develop their autonomy and their sense of initiative. .”
However, these habits are not the only ones that need to be integrated. Beyond everyone’s daily responsibilities, the report stresses the importance of the company’s social utility and its exemplary nature. “We can not ask employees to engage in a box whose leaders give the impression of authorizing everything”, points out a business manager. The issue of global warming, in particular, worries employees and managers. “I don’t want my employees to be taken for polluters, so we have to be polished on the regulations, even if it would cost us less to pay the fines than to pay for our processes”, explains an entrepreneur quoted in “Du sens à l ‘work”. Today, notes the report, one joins a company wishing to be remunerated, “but not at any price: by building, not by destroying”. “Some companies also encourage the social and environmental commitments of their employees within their own structure”, points out Jean-Baptiste Barfety, author of the study. Another way to give meaning, beyond the daily work.