IFAPME

“Coming out of the health crisis, we wanted to provide our management committee with a deeper understanding of meaning at work to guide our HR decisions.”

IFAPME (Walloon Institute for Work-Based Training, Self-Employed Workers and Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises) is a public-interest body funded by the Walloon Region. Its network spans the whole of Wallonia through some fifteen training centres and supports thousands of learners, business owners and professionals in continuing education each year. The Charleroi IFAPME Centre, one of the largest in the network, brings together several sites and training sectors (construction, digital technologies, retail, business management, etc.).

Following a conference I had delivered for the Walloon Public Service during the health crisis, IFAPME wished to organise a dedicated webinar for its Extended Management Committee on 1 March 2021, in order to bring conceptual clarity to the question of meaning at work. The aim was to inform the executive committee’s thinking as it shaped its HR policy, at a time when teams had been deeply affected by the pandemic and when many questions were emerging about the future of work.

Providing the executive committee with a structured perspective on meaning at work

This engagement grew out of an observation shared by many organisations after the first lockdown: the difficulties teams were facing were not only organisational or health-related, but also reflected a deeper questioning of people’s relationship with their work, the usefulness of their missions, their professional relationships and their work-life balance. For a training institute such as IFAPME, whose mission is itself strongly meaning-driven, understanding these mechanisms was a necessary prerequisite for any HR decision.

The aim of the webinar was therefore to provide the members of the extended management committee with solid conceptual reference points, so they could identify with greater precision the levers they could act upon and guide the work of the HR department over the long term.

The format chosen was a 45-minute webinar, structured around accessible theoretical content, concrete illustrations (the well-known parable of the stonecutter, verbatim quotes from my research conducted during the health crisis) and discussion time with participants. The challenge was to offer an analysis rigorous enough to support strategic reflection, while remaining directly usable by executives who are not specialists in occupational psychology.

Translating research on meaning at work into a decision-making framework for HR

The intervention drew on research on meaning at work, professional transitions and the effects of crises on individual and collective reference points. Particular attention was paid to the conceptual distinction between meaning of work (which refers to the work activity itself, its tasks and the skills it mobilises) and meaning at work (which refers to the environment in which the employee operates: team, organisational purpose, working conditions). This distinction is essential to identify precisely the levers of action available to an executive committee.

The webinar offered a reading of meaning at work through the six core components of the model developed by Estelle Morin (2009): intrinsic satisfaction, ethics, human relations, efficiency, security and autonomy, and occupation. These six dimensions served as an analytical grid to understand the difficulties exacerbated by the health crisis (loss of collective reference points, isolation linked to remote work, tensions around recognition, feelings of unfairness, questioning of the usefulness of certain missions) and to identify, component by component, concrete levers of action that the executive committee could mobilise.

The findings of a qualitative study I had conducted in April 2020, with people who had previously experienced a period of questioning about the meaning of their work, were also presented. Three main dynamics emerged from it: a sense of helplessness in the face of the crisis leading to deeper questioning, new awareness linked to changes in lifestyle during lockdown, and the exacerbation of pre-existing organisational and managerial difficulties. This broader perspective enabled IFAPME’s management committee to connect these wider patterns to the signals they were observing within their own teams.

My intervention, based on a research-action approach, unfolded as follows

Exploring together: An initial conversation with IFAPME’s HR department helped me understand the specific challenges the institute was facing after the first lockdown, and the ways in which the management committee wished to draw on this intervention to guide its HR decisions. This phase made it possible to fine-tune the depth of the content for an audience of executives who are not specialists in the field, and to focus on the elements most useful for their decision-making.

Drawing on scientific research: The content of the webinar was grounded in robust research, particularly Estelle Morin’s six-component model of meaning at work (2009), as well as the distinction between meaning at work and meaning of work. I also drew on the findings of my qualitative study conducted in April 2020 with ten people who had previously experienced a period of questioning about the meaning of their work, published notably in The Conversation. All of this material was translated into accessible language and illustrated through concrete situations.

Co-constructing with initiators, stakeholders and end users: The webinar alternated between theoretical input and Q&A sessions, allowing the members of the management committee to connect the concepts to their own organisational reality and to test the analytical framework against situations they had experienced within IFAPME. The six components of meaning at work were presented not as an abstract typology, but as a framework directly usable to identify priority actions for the HR policy.

Measuring the impact and value of the project: The presentation materials were handed over to the institute so they could serve as a reference for the management committee’s subsequent work on HR policy. The discussions that followed the webinar helped to identify several concrete avenues of reflection for the HR department, grounded in the framework of the six components.

Why a research-based consulting expertise was relevant for this engagement

For an executive committee seeking to build a robust HR policy in a context of crisis, it is not enough to rely on best practices inspired by other organisations. It needs to draw on a rigorous analytical framework, one that helps identify the real mechanisms at play and prioritise the levers for action.

For this engagement, the research-based consulting approach made it possible to provide such a framework, by translating scientific research on meaning at work (Morin’s model) and on the effects of crises (my own qualitative research on people’s experience of the pandemic) into an analytical lens that could be directly used by a management committee. Beyond observation, it enabled the committee to see the six components of meaning at work as so many concrete entry points to shape an HR policy genuinely rooted in the lived experience of teams.