CNFPT – French National Centre for Territorial Civil Service

“We wanted to support our managers so that they would know where they were heading, give meaning to their own objectives, share them with their teams, and create the conditions for the collective to move forward.”

The French National Centre for Territorial Civil Service (CNFPT) is responsible for the training of staff working in French local authorities. As part of the programme designed for the Sud PACA Regional Council, the organisation identified a central challenge for its managers: examining the factors that produce meaning, both for themselves and for their teams, and identifying concrete courses of action.

This challenge was particularly acute in mid-2021: after more than a year of health crisis, local authorities had seen their ways of working profoundly disrupted (remote work, reorganisation of duties, weakening of collectives). Many managers were facing teams marked by doubts about the usefulness of their work, the recognition they received, or their professional pace.

In this context, the CNFPT wanted to offer a short, online training session that would help its managers better understand the notion of meaning at work (often confused with motivation or well-being) and leave with concrete levers they could immediately apply with their teams.

Understanding meaning at work to act more effectively as a manager

The training session starts from a widely documented observation: the decline in engagement, the quiet quitting, and the growing sense of uselessness observed in teams are not solely a matter of work organisation. They often reflect a deeper questioning of the relationship to work, of professional relationships, of the values upheld by the organisation, and of work-life balance.

The training session “Creating meaning for your team” was designed specifically for the CNFPT, drawing on the most recent research data, made accessible and immediately operational. Three hours long and delivered remotely on Adobe Connect, it alternated theoretical input, plenary discussions and a practical workshop in small groups, so that each participant could appropriate the concepts in light of the reality of their own service.

A reading framework grounded in research

The content draws on reference research on meaning at work, translated into a practical reading framework. This framework enables managers to move beyond a reductive interpretation (equating meaning with well-being or motivation alone) in order to identify precisely the factors that create or undermine meaning, recognise the weak signals of a loss of meaning within their teams, and act at the right level, including in contexts of change or crisis.

Stages of the engagement

The engagement unfolded as follows:

Framing: exploring with the CNFPT the expectations of the local authority (knowing where one is heading, giving meaning to one’s own objectives and sharing them, building cohesion) in order to precisely calibrate the content and format of the training.

Illuminating: sharing research insights on the notion of meaning at work, its components and its dimensions, illustrating each concept with concrete examples (from the stonecutter parable to accounts of the health crisis) so as to anchor theory directly in participants’ daily experience.

Putting into practice: facilitating a workshop in three small groups based on six concrete cases drawn from the post-Covid reality of local authorities (purpose of work, nature of tasks, social relationships, sense of fairness, security, work-life balance), in order to identify managerial levers specific to each component of meaning.

Engaging in dialogue: sharing in plenary the avenues identified by each group, cross-referencing practices, and closing the training with a collective discussion on the first actions each participant intended to implement with their team.

Why a research-based consulting approach was relevant

Faced with a diffuse loss of meaning, heightened by the health crisis and by the transformation of work in the territorial civil service, it would have been tempting to respond with generic managerial recipes. The contribution of research made it possible to establish a more accurate diagnosis: distinguishing what relates to the activity itself from what relates to the work environment, and connecting the difficulties experienced to specific components of meaning. Managers thus left with a shared understanding and concrete levers, rather than abstract principles.

By equipping managers themselves, the engagement aimed at a lasting effect: it is they who, on a daily basis, can rally their teams around shared values and recreate the conditions for work that is meaningful, including remotely and in a context of transforming public service.