Is à la carte work relevant? Will employees in the future be able to choose their place of work, their personal organization, or even their employment status? Les Rencontres RH, the monthly management news meeting created by The world in partnership with ManpowerGroup, brought together on Tuesday, February 8, in Paris and remotely, a dozen human resources managers to discuss the place of the individual in their companies.
The aspiration of employees for more autonomy is not new, but it goes far beyond since the health crisis which, once again, served as an accelerator to a fundamental trend. In the enterprises, “During the Covid period, we saw the rise of individualism. The HRDs have been confronted with the taking of freedom of employees, who have moved without reporting it, for example. For 40% of our member companies, the links with the work collective have been weakened. We had to remember that the individual should not prevail over the collective.testifies Laurence Breton-Kueny, vice-president of the National Association of HRDs.
In the small security company Panthera, “we are increasingly interested in the concerns of our employees. They no longer hesitate to make personal demands on housing or salary. These are so many frustrations when they are not accepted”, deplores the HRD, Alexis Berthel. ” There is’individualization desirable and that which is less so »sums up Franck Bodikian, the HR manager of ManpowerGroup France.
Increasing individualization
Strengthening the place of the individual in his relationship to work actually covers two concepts, introduced André-Yves Portnoff, specialist in the sociology of organizations. “We must distinguish individualism, which designates the withdrawal into oneself of the employee who seeks to progress for himself, without worrying about others, individualization, namely the aspiration for more freedom to build one’s life according to one’s own values and impulses. It is this second notion that is progressing. »
Statistics from the European Values Survey confirm that individualization is on the rise. It thus rose from 27% to 35% between 1999 and 2017, while individualism fell from 65% to 54% over the same period in the twenty-two European countries studied. ” Much more than twenty years ago, employees want to achieve something, take initiatives and also, of course, be well paid. Nearly a third of French people say that a good job should be useful for society, not just for the company”, adds Mr. Portnoff. Individualization would thus be the vector of the search for a better balance between private life and professional life, noted by the majority of HRDs present, and of a quest for meaning.
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