“Giving meaning to work. » Whatever one may say, employers only care about it in the minority and on the surface. Even companies that have made the effort to formulate their “raison d’être” are missing the essential point: the return of vital issues, conveyed in particular by climate violence and the precariousness of resources.
With the exception of a few sobriety actions triggered by soaring energy prices, the daily lives of employees have not changed in recent years. The hierarchy of priorities given to them is surprisingly stable. The indicators deemed key remain the same.
Internal projects, procedures, tools, training… none of this has changed fundamentally. In reality, our organizations remain prisoners of a bygone era, and thus nourish a feeling of absurdity among a growing number of workers. How to explain such inertia? And above all, how to get out of it to restore meaning?
From the problem of individual obsolescence
Much has been said about the causes of this inertia, and there is no question here of reviewing them all. I will insist on one of them, passed over in silence despite its decisive character in productive organizations. The spotlight is now on environmental and industrial threats. This choice is understandable, but it leaves another threat in the shadows: individual obsolescence.
To measure its weight, we must first of all consider that each of us has invested a long time and heavily to acquire know-how. This know-how is a set of solutions whose value depends on the persistence of the problems it solves. In other words, our existence as a producer depends entirely on the problems that have seen us mature.
Acting vigorously in favor of the climate and the security of supplies means abandoning past problems, and therefore brutally devaluing the solutions that we embody… It is true that others before us have experienced individual obsolescence, but at some point in history they were only a dominated minority.
The danger of the status quo
In this case, the threat concerns an overwhelming number of decision-makers and “influencers”, i.e. the engineers, executives, professors and other masterminds behind what shapes daily life. organizations.
In addition, these actors hold each other. We are all surrounded by bosses, customers, shareholders… in short, principals. Taking the initiative alone to emerge from immobility is tantamount to seceding. This involves telling the principals: “your old concerns are trivial”. The lockdown is systemic!
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