Structuring, standardizing, streamlining, following procedures and anticipating… For years, organizations have been waving at these keywords as solutions to malfunctions, and as a means of increasing productivity and reducing lead times. What if, on the contrary, they suffered from an excess of formalization, planning and structuring of time? François Dupuy, sociologist and Hélène L'Heuillet, psychoanalyst, each show us in their own way how harmful a management that would like to anticipate everything can be.
François Dupuy is a specialist in the sociological analysis of organizations, and the author of a series of three books on the excesses of management. In We do not change the company by decree, he reminds us that the organization is not the structure. The functioning of the company is only a distant reflection of what managers have planned and imagined through processes and procedures. The desire to anticipate the work of the teams as tightly as possible comes up against informal relations and power relations far removed from hierarchies.
François Dupuy regularly refers to the work of Michel Crozier, who shook up our representations of organizations in the second half of the 20th century. In particular, he studied a tobacco production and distribution company in France, Seita. In this big structure, you could believe that everything had been thought out, that all the employees were oriented towards the same objectives: to produce more, to reduce waste, to sell more cigarettes... And yet, the observation revealed issues , objectives, strategies, areas of tension and power relations of which the hierarchy was unaware.
In particular, employees assigned to maintenance were the only ones who could intervene when a machine stopped. No one could impose a repair time on them because no one else had the technical skills. Because they had control over these deadlines, and therefore over production, they held power, linked to what Crozier calls a " zone of uncertainty ". No one dared to upset or rush them and they thus benefited from a great deal of autonomy.
The structure or functioning as thought of by the leaders of a company therefore often has little to do with its actual organization. But François Dupuy takes his criticism a notch further. It shows us how managers multiply controls and procedures, to reassure themselves or give themselves a feeling of mastery.
This formalization has a cost: it leads to multiplying meetings, reports, Excel spreadsheets at the expense of time spent in the field. In production companies, executives no longer go to the manufacturing sites. They confine themselves to their office and produce documents to report to their hierarchy. They no longer accompany their teams, they ask them for figures.
Disclosure of reporting lines and support functions wastes valuable time for organizations. François Dupuy explains to us with a touch of irony that to justify their position, some executives ask operational staff for more information and increasingly formalize operations. But the moment quickly arrives when no one is in a condition to know all the rules and when they come into contradiction with each other.
François Dupuy gives us a few examples, including that of a tragic train accident in France. Surveys have shown that many procedures existed, that they were often followed but that they could also be contradictory.... A. e employee. and confronted. e to a whole series of inconsistent instructions has no other way out than to make choices. He/she thus finds a zone of freedom, but can also worry about the impossibility of being in conformity on everything.
The work-to-rule is a paradoxical mode of protest. It consists in strictly and blindly applying the rules, without taking the appropriate measure, and thus blocking the functioning. Controllers who check each planned checkpoint, judges who postpone the hearings if the conditions provided for are not met, and it is quickly an entire organization that is frozen! The Intime Conviction site explains in 2010 how this paradoxical form of protest, since it is based on meticulous compliance with procedures, can quickly paralyze a structure.
Hélène L’Heuillet has a psychologist’s approach. In her book Praise of delay, she shows us another harmful aspect of this desire to organize everything:
Chasing dead time and trying to anticipate everything can lead to the loss of the feeling of one's own existence. We kept Giacometti's Walking Man as a 20th century image. Our century is one of the race, the pursuit of time and irrecoverable delay. We value urgency, fluidity, reduced deadlines. And we are complicit in this as consumers. The advertisements that boast of the delivery within an hour of curtain rods or bedside lamps seduce us.
Against the image of the countdown and the structuring of time to increase "effective working time", Hélène L'Heuillet brings us a eulogy of delay. Recovering one's balance involves rediscovering one's own temporality, through times that are apparently inactive, but necessary for inner life and creativity. Time is not a resource like any other, which should be optimised.
The analyzes of François Dupuy and Hélène L'Heuillet are very useful in preventing organizations from suffocating through excessive monitoring and control. They extend those, older, of Christophe Dejours who in Souffrance en France already noted how much the feeling of being late, of no longer being able to give meaning to one's work, could weigh on certain employees.
