Employee Satisfaction and Working Conditions: Results and Solutions Revealed

Ipsos and Qualisocial, the barometer of quality of life and working conditions, revealed their results at the start of January 2024: only one in three employees go to work with enthusiasm. The others go there mechanically or even backwards. This inevitably raises a question. Perhaps the primary purpose of work is not to make people happy. Some will say that it is just a way to survive, others that work is nothing but alienation and suffering.

How can we justify this discomfort? “First, due to a heavy workload, highlighted by almost 1/4 of employees. And then a poor balance between professional and personal life. Two out of five employees say they give up important moments outside of work “, explains Mathilde Piqué, journalist at RTL.

“The finding that is more alarming is the volume. The share of employees who go backwards is increasing. We explain this by the last four years which have been years full of twists and turns, tumults, and a lot of uncertainty. We first had Covid with the confinement and that was followed by a geostrategic crisis with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia which disrupted our economy. So, companies today are still in a dynamic of adaptation in the face of the economic upheavals that the world is experiencing,” adds Camy Puech, president of Qualisocial.

The absence of information promotes uncertainty, anxious and depressive tendencies

Camy Puech

What are the French demanding? “What happens number one, and we’ve never seen this, is that the employer creates conditions in which the employee can work in safety and have good health and therefore these are all the logics of the adaptation of work to man”, underlines Camy Puech.

How should businesses respond? The first factor is the place that the organization gives to people. And to be more precise, there is transparency and clarity of information. In times of uncertainty, we need to know. Except that in these moments, management tends not to communicate, because they prefer to say nothing rather than give bad news, but that is a mistake. The absence of information promotes uncertainty, anxious and depressive tendencies”, recalls Camy Puech before adding “the second factor which will play a big role, it will be human relations. Work is a place of life, it is a place of meeting and today more than yesterday, working on the experience that an employee will have at work, the meetings they will have, the The atmosphere he will experience is decisive for improving health, engagement and performance.”