Emmanuel Macron, “top manager” of the State? This Tuesday, March 12, in front of 700 senior administration executives, the President of the Republic did not mince his words to remobilize his troops. Seeing in the crisis of democracies “a crisis of the effectiveness of public action”, he becomes impatient: “At each level, we put brakes and at the end, where you have put 100 in force, we arrive at 5 or 10”, deploring the perceived meager results of state reform.
Some will regret that this reprimand took place in front of the cameras. “We don’t publicly criticize a collective of managers by calling the country to witness,” says a consultant. But basically, the message hits the mark. The Head of State “understands that management is an extremely important lever for productivity and value creation, including in the public sector,” welcomes Laurent Cappelletti, professor at Cnam. French research demonstrates this. , as well as at Harvard and the London School of Economics.
Can we talk about productivity in the public service without arousing mistrust from some or disbelief, even mockery, from others? “Public services have been built on a sort of anti-management guided by procedure, classification, rigidity. We put agents in boxes, salaries do not increase in relation to the quality of work, but on the basis of a past competition which has nothing to do with reality, continues Laurent Cappelletti. Public managers must motivate, encourage, evaluate staff in a system which does not allow it, or very imperfectly. Not to mention that the unions are shooting themselves in the foot, they who regularly defend this type of bureaucratic management and refuse, for example, individual merit bonuses.”
Time, the key to success
For Bruno Mettling, however, “the State is not a machine impossible to reform”. This human resources specialist, who had a career in the highest positions in the private sector (Banques populaire, Orange) as well as in the public sector before founding the Topics firm, judges that “the drama of the transformation of the administration lies in the fact that it is subject to the short time frame of politics, the horizon of which does not exceed six months. Every day, these administrations undergo reforms which call into question the previous ones. It still notes some successes, such as the digital shift of the General Directorate of Public Finances led by Bruno Parent, the architect of withholding tax, or the modernization of Pôle emploi which became France Travail, under the leadership of the then general director, Jean Bassères. What do these successes have in common? “Bosses in place for five or ten years, who have had time to implement their transformation.”
The plague of hidden costs
Absenteeism, accelerated staff turnover, demotivation… Administrations which continue to apply old management recipes see their “hidden costs” increase – charges invisible in public accounts at the time they arise, and not taken into account in budget forecasts. Taylor’s division of labor and Weber’s bureaucracy have come to an end. “These principles may have worked a century ago, but mentalities and the relationship to work have evolved,” points out Laurent Cappelletti.
The academic defends the idea of local management, “based on permanent dialogue to achieve a point of balance between what the organization can do and the wishes of civil servants”. This requires autonomy and resources, of course, but for a multiplied gain. Researchers estimate that 1 euro invested in the quality of management yields 4, on average, in productivity. “It’s much more than the impact of material investment,” insists the professor at Cnam. An attractive avenue, while the State is weighed down by more than 3,000 billion euros of debt and has been scolded, once again, by the Court of Auditors. Managerial efficiency would open up a source of considerable savings.
To achieve this, Laurent Cappelletti promotes the concept of “concerted autonomy”, a mixture of verticality – the hierarchy and its descending orders – and horizontality, with more collaborative working times. An aspiration which unfortunately comes up against the rigidity of the status of civil servants. Will the upcoming civil service reform break down some barriers? Failing this, generational renewal will do its work. For a long time, even the most jaded agents stuck to their jobs ad vitam aeternam – a source of unfathomable hidden costs. For young professionals of the 2020s, in the post-Covid era, there is no question of getting old if you are not convinced at the end of the trial period. So many empty chairs that will force the administration to move.
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