30%: this is the level of increase in the risk of voluntary departure of an employee losing meaning, with an equivalent profession, age, sex and level of diploma. An impact revealed by the work of statistician Thomas Coutrot and economist Coralie Perez, as part of the scientific mediation project “What do we know about work? », from the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for the Evaluation of Public Policies (Liepp), distributed in collaboration with the Liepp and the Presses de Sciences Po on the Emploi channel of Lemonde.fr.
To achieve this result, the two researchers began by measuring the meaning of work with their own tools: statistics and econometrics.
In ten questions, they constructed three partial indicators (social usefulness, ethical coherence, capacity for development) and a synthetic indicator of “meaning at work” which they cross-referenced with data on the working conditions of employees extracted from national surveys. the direction of the coordination of research, studies and statistics of the Ministry of Labor (Dares).
More workers than managers
The correlations allowed them to establish the consequences of the loss of meaning of work on the decision to leave a job and on the health of employees, eliminating the Covid-19 bias insofar as the figures from the Ministry of Labor cover the period from 2013 to 2016. “The most explanatory factor for the resignation between 2013 and 2016 is the fact that the person found little meaning in his work in 2013”note the authors. “A high intensity of work or conflicts with the superior also encourage leaving, but not the level of salary or even the feeling of being poorly paid: contrary to a common prejudice, salary is not the main determinant of mobility »they point out.
And when the departure is prevented, “the loss of meaning of work between 2013 and 2016 is associated with a sharp increase in absenteeism due to illness”, up to 40% for the 20% of employees whose meaning indicator fell the most over the period. The meaning of work then becomes a public health issue.
Moreover, “It’s not a problem of the rich”, say the researchers. The risk of depression, which is multiplied by two in the event of a loss of meaning at work, affects workers more than managers.
Finally, after having analyzed at length the causes of the loss of meaning at work (management by numbers, frequent changes, decision-making “above ground”, “disconnected from the field”), the researchers, in a constructive approach, put forward a few avenues change in governance, management and social dialogue, to reconnect with meaning at work.
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