Ophélie Artaud 10:00 am, May 01, 2023

While May 1st celebrates Work, more and more French people are feeling uneasy in their professional lives. A feeling that has increased since the health crisis. While the first recommendations of the Assises du Travail have just been rendered, how to enable workers to regain well-being?

"Reconsider work" and "restore confidence" of workers. These are the objectives of the recommendations of the Assises du Travail, published at the beginning of last week. Carried out within the framework of the National Council for Refoundation, this reflection on professional life comes at a time when the psychological state of employees seems to be at its lowest. According to a barometer published at the beginning of March for the firm Empreinte Humaine, specialized in the prevention of psychosocial risks, 44% of employees say they are in a situation of psychological distress.

The health crisis has changed the relationship to work

A malaise that seems to have been accentuated since the health crisis, where many French people have reconsidered their relationship to their jobs. Some have even resigned or reconverted. "What we have gone through with this pandemic has confronted us with another way of looking at our own professional activity, by asking ourselves questions that we did not have time to ask ourselves in a normal context," explains Sophie Prunier-Poulmaire, lecturer in ergonomics at the University of Paris-Nanterre, and author of the book Les grands quartiers d'affaires à l'heure des choix - Travail, salariat, urbanisme à l'épreuve des crises du XXI siècle (Vuibert editions).

For the researcher, the causes of this malaise are "multifactorial". First of all, the pandemic has created among employees a "step back that is both spatial, especially with teleworking, but also highly symbolic," says the researcher. Also, employees questioned "the management and the relationships they have with their hierarchy", as well as the meaning of their work.

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"This loss of meaning is well before Covid and comes from the fact that for years, we have witnessed a shift from industrial constraints to services, such as time management, just-in-time, rushed management... And we ended up managing telephone platforms, cashiers or hospitals as we would manage a factory," says Sophie Prunier-Poulmaire. This is sometimes compounded by a lack of balance between work and social or family life, especially for those who work atypical or staggered hours.

Rethinking the organization of work

Combined, these factors end up causing discomfort, psychological distress or, in the worst case, depression. Because "if we have tried in recent decades to reduce the physical arduousness of work, and this is to be welcomed greatly, today the real question concerns this invisible arduousness of work which, at a given time, can lead to psychosocial risks or burn-out," says the ergonomist.

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Once this observation has been made, what could be the solutions to enable employees to regain well-being in their professional lives? The Assises du Travail highlighted the need to reorganize work. An observation shared by Sophie Prunier-Poulmaire: "We must rethink the organization of work in its temporal, managerial and obviously physical components. We must think about it starting from real work and never from prescribed work, that is to say by asking what is the daily reality of workers, "says the ergonomist.

The four-day week, a solution?

All this seems to explain why a majority of French people - 68% according to an Ifop poll for the Journal du Dimanche published at the beginning of April - reject the pension reform and the increase in the legal retirement age to 64: "We must listen to those who say that they do not feel able to go to the end of their career and extend their working hours", insists the researcher. "I particularly regret that we are addressing the subject of extending working life to 64 years without also asking the question of reducing working hours on a weekly scale", in particular through a reflection on the four-day week.

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A proposal that also appears in the recommendations of the Assises du Travail to "promote the balance of life time". Some countries have already adopted it and experiments are currently being carried out in some French companies.

If, for the researcher, it is not necessary to rush, serious reflections around the four-day week deserve to be engaged. "There is no ready-made and ideal solution, but in the deadlock situation we are in today, there may be ways that would revolve around this issue that lives a lot of people. It could converge in the questions of quality of life and balance," says Sophie Prunier-Poulmaire. One way may be to finally "re-enchant work".