Bruno Le Maire's office in Bercy.

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ERIC DESSONS / JDD / SIPA

  • Bruno Le Maire recently criticized the changes in ministries, saying they made work inefficient.

  • Several studies have shown a link between the quality of the layout of the workplace and the improvement of productivity.

  • The presence of natural elements, such as plants, seems to be a real motivator.

Bruno Le Maire is a survivor.

And we hardly exaggerate.

"When you are crushed by a gilded ceiling and your offices are complicated, and to find an advisor you have to walk through four corridors, turn five doors, all decorated with stucco, I don't think that promotes efficient work", complained this week the Minister of the Economy, questioned on France Inter.

Did the current tenant of Bercy, a building erected in the 1980s, have in mind his visit to the “old” hotel Matignon in 2006?

Then director of the cabinet of Dominique de Villepin, he found himself installed in a richly decorated office, within this building dating from the 18th century.

He must have shuddered.

This is not the first time that Bruno Le Maire has attacked the palaces of the Republic.

In 2016, when he was a candidate for the right-wing primaries, he briefly expressed the idea of ​​a move of the presidency.

Gone is the Elysée, instead of a more modern building.

Its goal: "to break the monarchical codes" and the phenomena of the Court.

Beyond his personal opinion on the gilding, the Minister raises an interesting point: to what extent do the work environment and the layout of the offices influence our productivity?

Glory to closed offices

To our knowledge, no scientific research has measured the effect of the gold of the Republic on the effectiveness of ministerial advisers.

In addition, "we cannot calculate productivity in services, especially public services, with the same indicators as those used in industry," recalls Faridah Djellal, economist and professor at the University of Lille.

In industry, schematically, you divide production by the number of employees.

But to say that one hospital is more productive than another because it has more patients is nonsense ”.

Despite these limitations, several recent studies have attempted to address this issue of productivity as a function of the workplace.

In 2015, the CSA and JLL institute, for example, carried out a survey on this link, based on the feelings of 600 employees located in Ile-de-France.

If the survey does not mathematically quantify the gain or loss of efficiency, it delivers some interesting lessons.

Thus, 82% of employees working in a closed office believe that the layout of their workplace "promotes performance", against 53% of those who work in an open space.

And the more the open space welcomes people, the more the perceived performance decreases: "The perceived efficiency of the work environment (…) decreases sharply beyond 30 people sharing the same open space" note the authors.

Plants, a performance booster?

Another very interesting study, the one published in 2014 by four European researchers in the

Journal of Experimental Psychology

.

His interest ?

The authors carried out their work directly in companies.

One of the experiments was to compare the productivity of two similar groups of consultants from a London agency.

They had to complete a series of tasks as quickly as possible.

One of the groups was placed in a space devoid of any decoration;

the other group was placed in a space of the same size, but decorated with green plants.

Result: “the participants who worked in the office with the plants were more productive (…) The tasks were accomplished faster, and above all, with fewer errors than in the other office”.

For researchers, this empirical result contradicts a whole “business” literature that extols the supposed merits of stripped-down and impersonal offices (the “ 

lean office

 ” in original version).

“Managers often insist that offices should not accommodate plants, photos, souvenirs, food, in the hope of (…) maximizing productivity,” write the study authors.

A prejudice fueled by the fact that the " 

lean office

 " "echoes austerity and lower costs.

In an economy where people are losing their jobs, investing in plants where other so-called non-essential items appear frivolous, ”the authors explain.

Green gives wings

This “green plant” effect - or “biophilic design” in the jargon of specialists - is corroborated by other research published in 2015 by Cary Cooper, professor of organizational and health psychology at Lancaster University (United Kingdom).

Even though the report was sponsored by a company specializing in office fit-out, its conclusions are nonetheless interesting, particularly in view of the size of the study: lasting fifteen years, it concerned 3,600 employees spread over eight countries.

“Our study reports 13% and 8% higher levels of well-being and productivity, respectively, for office workers working in environments containing natural elements,” says Cary Cooper.

These elements can be green plants, of course, but also exposure to natural light, or even a view of the outside.

Bruno Le Maire is lucky: his office in Bercy meets all these criteria (see photo illustration).

An optimal arrangement which surely explains the tenfold productivity of the minister, able to manage the economic crisis of Covid-19 while writing a new book.

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