HASautonomy, responsibility, collective emulation, disappearance of hierarchical control… With “agile” methods, management “by project” or “liberated company”, many promises are made to employees so that consent to work and business performance. A research carried out in the engineering center of a car manufacturer operating in “project mode” shows that these organizations which intend to liberate work and workers are far from implementing all that they claim.
The context
Thirty-eight million American workers left their jobs in 2021. This gave rise to the concept of the “great resignation”, which refers to post-pandemic employee disenchantment. Confinement and telework having “revealed”, by contrast, the mediocrity of working conditions, even its “loss of meaning”. The phenomenon does not spare France, with 400,000 resignations from permanent contracts in the third quarter of 2021. Companies and the public service are struggling to attract candidates. Is it, in a period of economic recovery, the banal rebalancing of a market hitherto favorable to employers? Or a real “crisis of consent”, explored by sociologists, managers, lawyers, doctors, economists and psychologists gathered at ESCP Business School on June 9 and 10, for a symposium entitled “Consent? Why, how and to what? »
If the organization by project now irrigates most large companies, the firm studied was one of the first users in the early 1990s. The objective was then to stand out from the competition by reducing vehicle design time – which was a success, since, in the space of only two decades, this time has been reduced from sixty to eighteen months – thanks to a radical transformation of ways of working. On the one hand, the different professions (design, product development, process, purchasing, etc.) no longer intervene one after the other according to a sequential logic, but simultaneously throughout the development process. On the other hand, the pyramidal organization chart has been removed in favor of a matrix structure which adds to the vertical line of command by profession, a horizontal line of management of activities by project. The stakeholders of the different trades, previously separated within relatively tight departments, are brought together in multidisciplinary project teams, where each depends both on a manager, who controls and evaluates him, and on a project manager, which coordinates its activities operationally. At the end of each project, the teams break up and the employees are called upon to join new ones.
At first glance, this operation offers real opportunities to workers: over the course of the projects and in contact with colleagues with varied specialties, they would have the opportunity to broaden their networks and their knowledge, to make themselves known and recognized with a view to access the most valued projects.
Very fictitious autonomy
The survey shows that the links and connections have indeed greatly multiplied. However, employees believe that relationships within these teams remain mostly impersonal and instrumental, since they are essentially geared towards the coordination of productive tasks. As one of them puts it, “in the projects, we meet more than we mix”hence the difficulty of establishing a real dialogue between the professions and of making these teams into true collectives, offering opportunities for support and mutual assistance in the workplace. “Before, the design office was really a tribe (…). Now, every time we change projects, we find ourselves surrounded by colleagues we don’t know”says a technician.
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