Humanizing Business

By Henri Gillet

In the business world of the twenty-first century, absenteeism due to mental illness and related to work continues to grow and we do not see any success in the responses to stem this evil. Millennials already request a new relationship between management and the employees. A new paradigm.

With a long managerial experience in a large service company, but also his expertise as a logotherapist, Henri Gillet attributes this discomfort to the demeaning representation of the human being that business conveys and which poisons the daily life of its employees. An infantilizing vision of man permeates, to varying degrees, all strata of the company.

The author invites us to take a detour through Viktor Frankl's logotherapy to understand that everyone absolutely needs to find meaning in their life, including their professional life which is hampered by the relational and organizational dysfunctions of the business structure. Addressing this will involve new behaviors at work, but also another type of organization.

In this perspective, the Human Resources department will see its responsibility increased and renewed, because it is up to it to make the humanist commitment into a reality.

Henri Gillet shares a new vision of the professional field, which allows everyone to rethink their relationship to work, and more generally the meaning of their life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Henri Gillet
• Release date: Nov 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005342791

Book preview

Humanizing Business

Copyright 2020.

Henri Gillet

ISBN 978-1-716-21763-0

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Those who live are those who struggle;

Those with the soul filled by a clear goal,

Those who climb of a high fate the highest summit,

Those who walk thoughtfully, whose life has no limit,

Having before the eyes constantly, day and night,

Some saintly labor, some passionate fight.

It is the prophet prostrated by the ark,

It is the worker, shepherd, laborer, patriarch;

For those whose hearts are good the days fill aptly,

Those do live, Lord! Tis the others I pity.

Victor Hugo

Chatiments, Book IV, 9.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1. A corporate malaise denounced by the actors who contribute to it.

Chapter2. A new conception of man in business: Logotherapy by Viktor Frankl.

Chapter 3. Humanizing Business

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Author

Connect

Preface

I have just completed a career of over 40 years in a very large service company. I held about twenty positions there, most of which with an important management component.

I consider I had a very satisfying professional experience: not only did it often interest me and sometimes even impassioned me but, moreover, it gave me pleasure. I had pleasant and numerous relationships, social status and good material conditions. Of course, I encountered a few complicated situations: some were frustrating, others conflicting or nervously trying. But overall, I think I can say that I had an intense, stimulating and happy professional life.

Despite this, I ended it with questions that still challenge me and that I now try to resolve by tackling this book.

By simplifying this questioning to the extreme, I will formulate it with the following paradox. When I started working in the late 1970s, work was considered a constraint and experienced as a pleasure. The constraint was linked to the effort required to meet material needs and fulfill social duties. The pleasure came from the feeling of being useful, from the pride of a job well done, from the often joyful solidarity between colleagues and even from the relations with the mostly benevolent management imbued of a paternalistic attitude.

By the time I finish my career, 40 years later, at the end of the 2010s, work is seen as a means of self-realization and experienced as a suffering. Indeed, although work is now widely accepted as one of the major keys to personal development, it is too often perceived as disappointing, frustrating, and even pathogenic. The company (business in general) has become the place that exposes people to dangers that were at the beginning, if not unknown, at least unidentified: psychosocial risks. Their consequences are such that the company must now put in place policies to curb absenteeism, demotivation and disengagement.

How to explain this paradoxical inversion between reality and the experience of work in only forty years?

My initial training in management is similar to that experienced by all those of my generation. For my part, it had consisted in listening and watching the older ones do it, but also by referring to my father's example and drawing on my experiences as a sports team leader. I tried to exercise my common sense on the level that we would call today psychological and social but that we then called individual and relational. This type of management proved to be quite effective, was accepted and provided the expected results with the minimum of drama and psychodrama.

Today, management training is long. It is provided by various educational organizations which have a consistent, consensual and convincing theoretical corpus. Even if the main principles of this corpus were formalized in the 1960s and have not seen any real revolutions since, it has continued to grow richer for half a century and updated itself in the light of recent developments in psycho-sociological and even neurological understandings. In addition to training classes, everyone can access their ideas via a myriad of press articles, books and conferences, most of which are accessible online.

Why is it that management formerly learned on the job, based on example and common sense, in a world where people worked out of material necessity, generated rather satisfied or even happy employees, while now a more skillful and careful management learned over many years in the best universities, applied in a world where work is now recognized as an essential factor in self-fulfillment, generates so much discomfort?

Everything seems due to the fact that working conditions have changed considerably in forty years for different reasons: globalization has exacerbated competition, financial capitalism has brought in the short term, the results demanded by a shareholder structure that has become more international, new information technologies and social communications have accelerated exchanges in a disproportionate way, in particular by pulverizing the traditional barrier between professional and private lives. These three factors have certainly combined to increase the pressure undergone by managers and the pressure they pass on to their employees. Both are worried by an unemployment rate that seems structural (in particular in Europe) and by the need for continuous training because the time for a career entirely carried out in a single company doing a single job, is over.

However, does that justify everything? Does this release the company from its human responsibility? It seems to me that it is high time to question the governance and managerial practices which, voluntarily or not, conscious or not, degrade the psychological quality of life of many employees, managers included. This necessarily leads to questioning the world of business on a certain conception of man that generates such abuses. If business leaders agree to endorse a more humanistic vision it will require them to work a better coherence between what is done and what is wished for. To shed light on this salutary process, I will describe the characteristics and the consequences in our societies of a more humanizing approach to man.

Introduction

Polls show that a certain malaise at work is growing in intensity. It might not affect all the employees, but a large enough number and to a degree acute enough for the overall observed data to be affected. In Europe, we see a notable and regular increase in absenteeism for illness of undefined and psychological origin linked to work. Rates of suicide in the USA are breaking records, so are deaths by overdose. More and more people demonstrate violently in the streets, sometimes for obscure reasons.

For some, the economic and technological changes of the last decades are at the origin of the degradation of the nature of work and its perception in our everyday lives. That would be enough to explain this seemingly inexorable increase in discomfort. For my part, I think that, for a significant number of employees, it finds its causes instead in some desperation to see their higher needs and expectations come true. Whether consciously or unconsciously, they intended to derive a satisfaction from their professional activities that does not seem to come about.

Although policies in terms of quality of life or happiness at work today mobilize significant investments, they apparently have no impact on this deterioration. However, they strive to satisfy traditional demands for comfort and recognition. We can therefore deduce that strengthening these elements of well-being at work does not tackle the real causes of the malaise. We can always prevent psychosocial risks better, but will this be enough to reduce the observed discomfort?

We now know that if well-being results from the satisfaction of certain needs, frustration on the other hand, comes from psychological insecurity and the feeling of being useless or misused in one’s profession, or to the difficulty of finding a meaning in what one does, in other words it is an existential frustration felt in the work place.

Humans are in fact highly motivated to deploy the energy necessary to meet their needs for physical, material and psychological security which, in the work place, concerns in particular their status and the consideration to which they are the object. The dissatisfaction of this