Professor at HEC Paris, Olivier Sibony takes the clichés about ’commitment« at work and suggests three principles: autonomy, control and meaning.
What do you mean by ’commitment« at work?
Commitment’ has become an all-purpose word that everyone fills in as they see fit. Personally, I reserve it for the situation where an employee goes above and beyond the call of duty: he does his job with care and, what's more, comes up with ideas, speaks proudly of his company to the outside world and even recommends it to his friends and family. It's important to remember that commitment in the workplace is first and foremost a collateral effect: you can't decree it, you can only create the conditions that encourage it.
The link between performance and commitment is often made: is it a cause or a consequence?
The correlation is undeniable; the causality less so. Is it because OpenAI motivates them effectively, or because they are intrinsically motivated by the AI project that brought them to the company? Probably both. In other words, engagement is both a symptom of good organisational health and a catalyst for performance; it remains to be seen in what order things happen.
What, in concrete terms, feeds the intrinsic motivation you're talking about?
Daniel Pink, author of La vérité sur ce qui nous motivate, explains it better than anyone. His recipe? Autonomy, control and meaning. Autonomy, first of all: employees want to be able to organise their work without a permanent babysitter. Mastery: everyone wants to progress and feel competent. Finally, meaning: contributing to something greater than oneself. Meaning doesn't just come from above: it also needs to be explained, embodied and passed on. This is one of the major roles of local management, which manages to link concrete tasks to a broader vision. It's like the parable of the cathedral builders: where one worker simply feels he's cutting stones, the other explains that he's building a cathedral. Autonomy, mastery, meaning: when these three pillars are solid, there's no need for incentives and carrot-and-stick threats, people motivate themselves.
Why, then, do we give so little value to the local manager?
Because our managerial imagination is swamped by heroic figures who are far removed from the field. Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are fascinating, rightly or wrongly, but CEOs don't manage many people: they undertake, they lead, and they may inspire. An employee's well-being depends first and foremost on their N+1. Yet becoming a manager is all too often the automatic reward for being a good technician. People are given responsibility for ten people without ever checking that they know how to listen, arbitrate and develop their colleagues.
Has the rise in teleworking revealed this managerial fragility?
The appeal of teleworking goes beyond the convenience of avoiding the commute: it's also a way of avoiding bad managers. A manager who orders a generalised «return to the office» is implicitly admitting that he or she has failed to set clear objectives or establish a relationship of trust from a distance. A good manager knows how to distinguish between «tele-robust» tasks and those that require a real presence. He or she organises work accordingly and transforms the office into a place of links and meaning, not a place of control. If we want employees to come back, we have to start by managing better. With this in mind, the office becomes a place where people can get together and be creative, not an open space where people physically «point out» their loyalty.
