“Rather than being riveted on performance, I simply wanted to release the agents’ energies. » In 2011, exhausted by the procedures, Patrick Négaret, former director general of the Primary Health Insurance Fund (CPAM) of Yvelines, wished “transforming the public service” with its 1,600 agents. Civil servants were divided into work units of ten to fifteen people, and a participatory innovation system was born: “Anyone in the fund could come up with an idea, and we saw for the implementation. Then we defined together a benevolent and demanding management. I started with lean [une méthode de gestion née au Japon], even if it is a swear word in the public! »
lean management, hybrid work, ” flex office”… Faced with the need to modernize and to gain in efficiency, administrations must carry out managerial transformations. They are often pointed out for their rigidity and the limited room for maneuver of their agents, who are going through a crisis of meaning: 80% of the 4,500 agents questioned in September 2021 by the collective “Our public services” declare themselves “faced with a sense of absurdity in the exercise of their work”.
Administrations in search of innovation are inspired first and foremost by businesses. Patrick Négaret, for example, organized visits to “liberated companies” to familiarize his agents with working independently. Placed under the authority of the Minister for Public Transformation and the Public Service, the Interministerial Directorate for Public Transformation (DITP) published in 2019 a report on what “can teach freed companies to administrations and public bodies”. The Île-de-France region, which gathered its 1,800 agents in 2018 in a new headquarters in Saint-Ouen, organized visits to the premises of Axa or Danone, but was above all inspired by another public administration, the Belgian Social Security.
Local experiments
Indeed, as private methods are not always easily adaptable to the public, innovations come mainly from communities. Thus, in its 2021-2026 administration project, the city of Caluire-et-Cuire (Rhône) has established subsidiarity as the basis of organization for its 600 agents: “That means you have to trust. It must be the agent who has the right information and contact with users who can make day-to-day decisionsexplains Bernard Agarini, General Manager of Services. Before, there was an organization in watertight silos, and departments that communicated relatively little with each other. It took a long journey to make people understand that we were richer by thinking about several things”.
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