Performance-based management and quality of work: an empirical assessment.

In France, in the private sector as in the public sector, performance-based management tends to become a norm. Performance-based management is supposed to improve service quality, productivity and efficiency, transparency of allotted means and achieved results, and to better focus the activity of employees and of the whole organization. This text reports a study conducted for the French Ministry of Budget by a team of researchers in ergonomics, sociology and management science, in order to assess the impact of performance-based management on employees, on teams and on work organization.

Analysis of organizational conditions for risk management: the case study of a petrochemical site.

This paper presents an ergonomic intervention in the petrochemical sector. The scheduled shutdown of one of the gas production sites has led the management to reduce the number of personnel on site, and then to get new recruits and experienced technicians from other sites as the policy for leaving personnel had not been properly planned, resulting in understaffing on site. Workers with seniority on the site, and who are also the most experienced do not accept the way newcomers are induced on site, whereas the management accuses them of resisting change.

Transmission of vocational skills between experienced and new hospital workers.

Objectives: This article presents the results of a study currently underway looking at the transmission of vocational skills between health care workers in a French hospital. The aim was to show that health care workers, in addition to their work with patients, also have to incorporate the transmission of vocational skills into their daily activities.

Methods: Thirteen transmission situations were observed and analyzed by means of an activity-focused ergonomic work analysis, with the aim of reporting on this "invisible work".

Impacting working conditions through trade union training.

Objective: This article presents a training course in work analysis via an understanding of real work. The course was aimed at trade unionists and was produced by researchers in ergonomics and occupational medicine. Designing this type of training is closely associated with the history of ergonomics in France and goes back to the basic principles: training by and for action, focusing on the concept of activity and the co-construction of knowledge, involving all actors in the relevant area of work.

Entering the workforce and on-the-job skills acquisition in the construction sector.

Objective: This paper presents a research project focused on the induction of newly hired employees in the construction sector in France, a sector in which employers report difficulties in retaining newly hired employees. The objective was to identify the diversity of new workers' employment status, and to understand what happens after they are hired, with a particular focus on the ways in which skills are acquired and passed on by the various protagonists.

Participants: 25 employees, all men, voluntarily took part in this study.

Training, age and technological change: difficulties associated with age, the design of tools, and the organization of work.

Objective: This article presents two ergonomic studies carried out when two French administrative bodies modernized their work tools. Our objective was to identify and define the vocational learning of experienced technicians who were required to adopt new working methods to cope with these technological changes.

Methods: We observed the work activity of technicians of different ages and length of service both before and during training, and also after their return to their work unit during the appropriation phase.