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2011-11-22 12:41:58
Schumpeter
Managers must shoulder some of the blame for France s troubled relationship
with work
EVERY year, Sophie de Menthon, a French entrepreneur, holds an event called J
aime ma bo te (I love my firm) in Paris. The idea is to counter the notion that
the French don t like work. Employees are enticed to make lip dubs (a video of
them lip-synching to music, if you need to ask), massage each other, vote for
the nicest colleague, arrange for the accountant to swap jobs with the
secretary and other stunts to celebrate their firm.
The much-mocked campaign has not had much luck. In 2007 a national strike
interrupted the festivities, and in 2009 a series of suicides at France T l com
spoilt the atmosphere. This year employees showed less love for their bo te
than ever before. Only 64% of those polled liked their company, down from 79%
in 2005.
A truer reflection of work attitudes came this summer when French workers
covered office windows with huge pictures made up of Post-it notes. Employees
at GDF-Suez, a utility, stuck thousands of them to the windows of its HQ near
Paris to represent Tintin, a comic-strip hero. Soci t G n rale s bankers
responded with a picture of Asterix and Obelix across six storeys. A few
employers cracked down on the time-wasting, but most did not dare.
Many outsiders conclude that French workers are simply lazy. Absolument D
-bor-d e! ( Absolutely Snowed Under ), a book which came out last year,
described how state employees compete to do nothing at work. Another title in
this bestselling genre on avoiding toil, Bonjour Paresse ( Hello Laziness )
by Corinne Maier, an economist, explained how she got away with doing nothing
at EDF, another utility.
In fact studies suggest that the problem with French employees is less that
they are work-shy, than that they are poorly managed. According to a report on
national competitiveness by the World Economic Forum, the French rank and file
has a much stronger work ethic than American, British or Dutch employees. They
find great satisfaction in their work, but register profound discontent with
the way their firms are run.
Two-fifths of employees, according to a 2010 study by BVA, a polling firm,
actively dislike their firm s top managers. France ranks last out of ten
countries for workers opinion of company management, according to a report
from 2007. Whereas two-thirds of American, British and German employees say
they have friendly relations with their line manager, fewer than a third of
French workers say the same. Many employees, in short, agree with Ms Maier, who
recommends that chief executives be guillotined to the tune of La Carmagnole ,
a revolutionary song.
If French work attitudes are out of the ordinary, French management methods are
also unusual. The vast majority of chief executives of big firms hail from one
of a handful of grandes coles, such as cole Polytechnique, an elite science
school. Through what is known as parachutage, they can arrive suddenly from the
top ranks of the civil service. Air France KLM, for example, announced
unexpectedly last month that its new chief executive would be Alexandre de
Juniac, formerly chief of staff to Christine Lagarde when she was France s
finance minister.
Although the grandes coles are superbly meritocratic candidates compete
against each other in a series of gruelling exams their dominance of corporate
hierarchies makes workplaces much less so. At a big French bank recently, a
manager promoted an executive, only to be reproached by a furious rival who
said he should have been given the job because he had done better in the final
exams at the same grande cole.
As Thomas Philippon, a French economist, pointed out in Le Capitalisme d H
ritiers , a 2007 book, too many big French companies rely on educational and
governmental elites rather than promoting internally according to performance
on the job. In the country s many family firms, too, opportunity for promotion
is limited for non-family members. This overall lack of upward mobility, argues
Mr Philippon, contributes largely to ordinary French cadres dissatisfaction
with corporate life. A study of seven leading economies by TNS Sofres in 2007
showed that France is unique in that middle management as well as the
lower-level workforce is largely disengaged from their companies.
For those farther down the ladder, French companies are hierarchical, holding
no truck with Anglo-Saxon notions of empowerment . And bosses are more distant
than ever. A big change in French management, says Jean-Pierre Basilien of
Entreprise & Personnel, a Paris research centre, is that industrial managers
now seldom rise through the ranks. Fifteen years ago a leading graduate would
have worked in factories before moving to headquarters. Now many come up via
finance or strategy.
From the ranks
There are important exceptions. Danone, a food-products firm, is one. It has
made a big effort to promote people solely on competence, says Charles-Henri
Besseyre des Horts, a professor at HEC, a business school which is one of the
elite grandes coles. The 2006 merger of Alcatel, a French telecoms-equipment
firm, and Lucent, an American one, created a less hierarchical group.
Alcatel-Lucent even encourages teleworking, uncommon in France because it means
trusting workers not to goof off. Jean-Pascal Tricoire, chief executive of
Schneider Electric, an ambitious energy-management firm, came up from the
ranks.
French companies have particular reason to worry now about their bad
boss-worker relations. An important factor in the growing gap in industrial
competitiveness between France and Germany, said a recent study by
Coe-Rexecode, an economic-research centre, is that German bosses and employees
are better than French ones at working together. French bosses badly need to
follow in the footsteps of Danone and other modernisers. If they try and fail,
then at least they can blame the workers.
Economist.com/blogs/schumpeter
from the print edition | Business