LManagerial modernization, tertiarisation and computerization of economies have brought certain improvements to working conditions. But they have distilled an individualization, a psychologization of the relationship of each person to their work, within the framework of an organization which remains very prescriptive, anchored in the Taylorian spirit and moreover subject to the practice of permanent change. These are the ingredients of a harmful situation, because the personal aspirations of employees to realize themselves and to “grow” in the workplace come up against the reality of work designed and organized by others. And this in a very abstract and disembodied approach (Disembodied Management. Survey on new work frameworksby Marie-Anne Dujarier, La Découverte, 2015).
Asked what puts them in a situation of “bad relationship at work”70% of “knowledge workers” (i.e. employees who mainly use their cognitive, relational and communicative faculties in the context of their work) recognize the importance of technical skills, but only 31% of between them have complete confidence in mastering these skills (“ Work Relationship Index », survey conducted by Edelman Data & Intelligence for HP between June 9 and July 10, 2023 among 15,624 people in 12 countries, including France).
One of the reasons which can explain this surprising lack of confidence among employees in their own skills actually comes from the practice of permanent change that many company managements implement. Frequent restructuring of departments and services, accelerated recomposition of professions, imposed mobility, repeated changes of software, moves… These explosions lead to the obsolescence of knowledge, individual and collective experiences accumulated by professionals, who find themselves in somehow reduced to the rank of “apprentices for life”, as the case of France Télécom shows (Between utopia and resignation, the permanent reform of a public serviceJean-Luc Metzger, L’Harmattan, 2000).
Employees lose all their bearings, are disoriented and cannot trust themselves: everything they know is disqualified because everything has changed. They then have to make enormous efforts to try to regain cognitive mastery of the content and environment of their work, while knowing that this will only serve them for a small number of years, because new changes will necessarily arrive. .
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