The Cnam

“A directorate to reinvent: how do you get 43 staff members on board with a new organizational structure while integrating remote work as a lasting way of working?”

The National Training Directorate (DNF) of the Cnam brings together 43 staff members across three units: certification offerings, training and rollout; understanding and supporting learners; and degree awarding (VES). In 2020, the directorate faced an accumulation of simultaneous changes: several managers leaving and arriving, an internal reorganization to anticipate, and a remote-work experiment abruptly accelerated by the health crisis.

How do you redesign an organizational structure in a participatory way within a 43-person directorate whose roles are highly cross-functional? How do you assess and make remote work permanent when lockdown conditions “forced” the experiment far beyond what was initially planned?

Involving every staff member in the redesign rather than imposing a structure from the top

The DNF carries out a wide range of missions, from accrediting training programs to awarding degrees, as well as supporting learners and coordinating a network of regional centers. In this highly cross-functional context, the main risk of a top-down reorganization was that it would worsen what staff already identified as their number one problem: the lack of visibility into other units’ activities and the coordination difficulties that resulted.

The National Training Director therefore wanted a genuinely participatory approach, one able to surface the real dysfunctions, build a shared mapping of activities, and lead to a new organizational structure that would make sense to the teams.

A six-step research-action approach, from survey to co-construction workshops

The support was built around a mixed method, combining data collection and collective intelligence:

Beforehand, a survey was sent to all 43 staff members to establish a baseline assessment of how the directorate functioned internally and how remote work had been experienced during the health crisis.

Three participatory workshops were then facilitated, one per unit, bringing together more than 35 staff members in all. These workshops combined a presentation of the survey results, a collective analysis of the dysfunctions and their causes, and reflection on ways forward, including the conditions for making remote work permanent.

An activity-mapping workshop brought together the Director, the Deputy Director, the unit heads and the service heads to compile the work of the three units and build a shared view of the directorate’s missions.

Unit-redefinition workshops made it possible to work in subgroups on reformulating the scope of each unit.

Finally, one-on-one working sessions with the Director and the Deputy Director made it possible to finalize the new organizational structure and to formulate recommendations on making remote work permanent.

The deliverables provided at the end of the assignment included a new organizational chart, a mapping of the directorate’s activities, and a detailed support report.

What the approach revealed

The main issue identified was not the organizational structure itself but the lack of visibility across units: many staff members did not know exactly what their colleagues in other units did, which made requests difficult and processes far from smooth. This clarification therefore became the guiding thread of the redesign.

On remote work, the experiment (initially planned at one day per week, before being extended by the lockdowns) proved a success for a large majority of staff, who wanted to continue it at two days per week. The support made it possible to translate this consensus into concrete recommendations: flexibility in choosing which days, aligned with the type of activity, and the retention of one mandatory day of collective on-site presence to preserve team dynamics.

Why a research-based consulting approach was relevant for this assignment

In a directorate this large and cross-functional, with staff whose roles intersect without always being known to one another, the challenge was not only to produce an organizational chart but to build it from the lived reality on the ground. The data-collection and analysis methods (survey, metaplan workshops, working groups) allowed everyone to have their say and provided a solid factual basis for the decisions then made together with the management. It was this step of collective listening that made the approach legitimate in the eyes of the teams, in a context where the health crisis made any organizational change particularly sensitive.