Another approach to well-being at work

The conference-debate with occupational psychologists Yves Clot and Jean-Yves Bonnefond, two of the authors of Le prix du travail bien fait – La coopération conflictuelle dans les organisations (Paris, La Découverte, 2021 ; co-written with Antoine Bonnemain and Mylène Zittoun) was exclusively held online, due to the sanitary context. You can re-watch it live and translated from French to English below. Unfortunately, due to a technical problem, the audio translation is missing between 57:23 and 1:19:30. We recommend you to enable the English subtitles for this part.

It is through our research on “management” over the past years (management of quality, security, projects, teams…) that we came across Yves Clot’s reflections on work. Yves Clot has long advocated that “there is no well-being at work without doing well”, meaning that well-being at work cannot be dissociated from issues that have to do with the quality of the work performed, the recognition and the satisfaction that everyone should be able to derive from it. In that sense, Yves Clot formulates a sharp criticism of how suffering at work is usually handled in organizations, via, for example, plans for the prevention of psycho-social risks related to work which are disconnected from the concrete issues of the activity.

In Le prix du travail bien fait, the authors show – basing their analysis on several experiences they led with teams encountering difficulties (in a nursing home, a cleaning service of a municipality or in a Renault factory workshop) – how conflicts about the quality of work can be a cooperative method in organizations, allowing the social climate to better up inside organizations. Yves Clot and Jean-Yves Bonnefond told us about these experiences which confirm the centrality of the question of quality both for social relations and for health at work.