“The lack of attractiveness of work causes colossal losses in added value”

PBeyond the split between those who are in favor of extending working life to 64 years and those who oppose it, a consensus is emerging between the two camps on the low attractiveness of working in France. Advocates of reform are rightly concerned about this, because an economically profitable and socially acceptable extension of working life is only possible if work is attractive from the beginning to the end of a career. Some opponents too, in particular the unions, whose raison d’être is the quality of life at work (QVT), regardless of the legal retirement age.

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Over the past thirty years, the loss of attractiveness of work for the French, especially the youngest among them, has been very marked according to all the polls carried out on the question, the Covid-19 having amplified the phenomenon. Disenchantment at work can also be seen through the flowering of concepts such as “the great resignation”, “the loss of meaning” or the “quiet quitting”.

Dissatisfaction at work, the spectrum of which is wide, from suffering at work to lack of consideration, is measured concretely through social indicators such as absenteeism, occupational illnesses, excessive staff turnover (difficulties in recruiting and retain people), quality defects and direct under-productivity caused by disengagement.

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Research shows that these indicators are particularly degraded in France in most companies, whatever their size, as well as in public organisations, whereas they are better in comparable countries, in particular Sweden, Germany or the Canada (Control hidden costs and performances, by Henri Savall and Véronique Zardet, Economica, 2020).

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Ultimately, the lack of attractiveness of work causes colossal losses in added value, which are most often hidden by traditional accounting information systems. The “hidden costs” of the lack of attractiveness of work can amount, according to research, to 20,000 euros per person per year, of which 35% to 55% are recoverable through regained job satisfaction. Aggregated at the macroeconomic level, this would represent an improvement of 4 to 8 points in annual gross domestic product.

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Faced with this observation, two societal choices are available to us. The first consists, if it is true that work is ” jail “, to seek to reduce it. The big problem is that work remains, until proven otherwise, the only active factor in the creation of value to finance social protection systems as well as the manufacture of products and services necessary for expanding human needs (in health, education, housing, security, justice, etc.).

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