Towards Managing Humanely

Abstract

Traditional Human Resource Management (HRM) is today fundamentally being called into question. Its tools and policies have contributed to a certain professionalisation in the management of persons, by means of managerial techniques, which are today challenged in terms of their results: high levels of resignations, dissatisfaction, lack of commitment, burnout, etc. Workers no longer want to be treated as ‘resources’, and HRM must not only be at the service of the economic and/or financial performance of firms. Whilst criticisms are numerous and deserve to be qualified, alternative offerings are more rare. In French-speaking countries, ‘Humane Management’ has truly developed and confers other cornerstones, end purposes and methods to the management of persons within organisations, whilst being more focused on human beings, real work and recognition for it. This chapter presents this proposal and the conditions for Managing Humanely and opens up the path to a more sustainable, ethical and qualitative management of people and organizations.

1. Introduction

Traditional Human Resource Management (HRM) has received a great deal of criticism in the world of work and businesses. In 2007, Sharon Bolton and Maeve Houlihan summarised these criticisms of instrumental and brutal management in their work entitled ‘Searching for the Human in Human Resource Management’ [1]. HRM has also been subjected to a certain amount of ‘bashing’ in the arts and literature – as we can see, for example, in films such as ‘Human Resources’ by Laurent Cantet (1999) or Stéphane Brizé’s trilogy (‘The Measure of a Man’, ‘At war’ and ‘Another world’, released in 2022) or the book entitled ‘DRH, la machine à broyer’ (‘HRM, the grinding machine’) by Didier Bille (2018). Human Resources’ professionals are themselves also ill at ease with the name of their position, and they do not hesitate to set other names: Human Relations Director, Chief Happiness Officer, Head of People Management, etc.

This constant underlying factor is well known and widely shared: traditional HRM considers both public and private sector workers as a resource whose performance must be improved whilst reducing costs. In this approach, the main aim of the HRM is above all efficiency – the result of improved resource planning, between rational investment and cost control. Such a vision, instrumental and oriented towards the sole pursuit of efficiency and profitability, reduces human beings in the workplace to resources to be exploited, objects to be seized, shaped and used [2]. However, neither work nor workers can be reduced to just a few figures in a column [3]. Companies cannot function without the daily giving on the part of workers [4, 5]. Managers are not accountants, and the purpose of HRM can no longer be only efficiency, the measurement of which suppresses real work [6]. Whilst this criticism has been voiced many times, within various disciplines, few alternatives have yet to emerge.

What is worse, teaching of HRM in business schools, universities and executive programmes reproduces this perspective that is less and less in tune with contemporary society – in which both young people and the less young mobilise to show respect for human dignity, preservation of the common good and recognition of all forms of diversity. In this way, a phenomenological analysis of the six most widely distributed manuals in the United States and the United Kingdom showed that humans are considered an economic variable, a resource that needs to be exploited as efficiently as possible to produce maximum economic value [7].

In other words, there is a need for other models to manage people and work, in tune with radical humanism [8], and that bring with them an anthropology of workers other than that of the homo economicus [9]. An alternative that values recognition at work, expertise and professions, in short, real work – rather than promoting the happiness or well-being of individuals in a psychological perspective [10], and even a company without management, in a perspective where happiness and autonomy are no longer ends, but instead a means of being more productive [11]. Humane Management is an offering that responds to this urgent need for the real. This is in line with an ethical perspective, promoting ‘representative’ and responsible management methods, which work towards respect for human dignity – which in itself automatically aligns Humane Management with the United Nations sustainable development goals. Whilst fundamentally being an affirmation of an alternative anthropology – in which humans are considered as reflective beings and not resources – it is also a matter of promoting the many different end purposes of management. Humane Management is presented as a vector for the rehumanisation of work and thereby is believed to contribute to the professionalization of humane company management by establishing and setting out its practices, both ethically and qualitatively.

This chapter presents this new path by briefly summarising a certain number of criticisms levelled against traditional human resource management and to which Humane Management seeks to provide a response. This proposal is then detailed and explained further, and I introduce the concrete implications that such an approach might have for the practical implementation of humane work management.

2. The limitations of traditional HRM

Traditional HRM is the approach that aligns itself with an exclusive perspective of contributing to the economic and financial performance of the company, that is, it helps to achieve the company’s objectives – efficaciously and efficiently – by planning, organising, directing and checking the use of organisational resources. This perspective translates into ‘management by measures’, in which so-called professionalised HRM is an approach made up of ‘objective’ indicators and measures. What are the results achieved by this?

2.1 Professionalization by measure

First and foremost, management by measures focused the attention of managers on what can easily be measured: quantifiable results. This obsession with measures – qualified as ‘scientism’ by Nobel Prize for Economics winner in 1974 Friedrich Hayek – evades the question of quality of work – a criticism formulated by another Nobel Prize for Economics winner in 1998, Amartya Sen – but also evades the issue of the work itself [12]. This governance by numbers, described by Alain Supiot [3], is being rejected on many fronts, with critics shedding light on its counter-productive and even negative effects on value creation and global well-being. In this way, economist Pierre-Yves Gomez [6] – in his essay entitled ‘invisible work’, retraces the ‘financialisation’ movement in management that led managers to overlook workers and work, preferring to them indicators that supposedly reflected the result of the activity. Sociologist Danièle Linhart [13] showed how individualised HRM dispersed labour collectives, thereby outlining a ‘century of the isolated’ in the words of Noreena Hertz [14], and in which solitude reigns, supported by an individualised management of professional needs, results and career paths. The research conducted into living conditions at work, well-being and quality of life in the workplace by various institutes in Europe allows a link to be established between this traditional HRM and the feeling of malaise experienced at work. In this way, 14.6% of Dutch workers have experienced feeling burned out, 96% of Portuguese workers risk experiencing depersonalisation [15]; 51% of French workers do not feel they receive sufficient recognition at work [16] and 64% of British employees feel that their colleagues and managers lack faith in them [17].

These observations are not only those of intellectuals, surveys and essayists. For several decades now, entrepreneurs have been taking the decision to manage human work differently in their organisations: by attempting self-management or democratic or participative forms of corporate governance. Whether we consider the ‘liberated company’ of Brian Carney and Isaac Getz [10], the ‘teal organization’ of Frédéric Laloux [18] or the holacracy of Brian J. Robertson [19], all these managerial innovations represent a break with the HRM of measures and the autocratic administration of resources. The cult of individual performance also seems to have gone out of fashion and today human resources are trying out systems of development and reward broadly based on work and collective results, as illustrated by the programme ‘At our best’ implemented at Ion Beam Application (IBA), the global leader in the proton therapy sector.

2.2 A contextualisation that is historically and culturally marked

HRM is anchored in a specific context that of the second half of the twentieth century. The theories and models mobilised in HRM – even today – are taken from the decades 1950–2000. These models were produced at a given moment in our history as a response to the social and organisational questions posed in that era, within specific terms. In the bureaucratic and (neo-)Taylorist organisation of the 1950s–2000s, in which work was divided horizontally (specialisation) and vertically (hierarchy), was the central question that of employee motivation? There has been a whole succession of universal laws and theories on organisational behaviour since then to respond to this question: fundamental needs, self-determination, etc. When it comes to work organisation, HRM adopts equally universal principles of resource management: plan, execute, check, readjust. In the 1980s, skills reference systems were created. The formula was the same, but it was applied to skills (again, an object that already distances the human being): plan the need for skills, measure skills, observe any deviations and remedy them through recruitment, firing or training. The professionalisation of HRM takes place via the transposition – in the area of people management and work organisation – of administration techniques focused on optimum allocation of resources; firstly in full-time equivalent and in working hours, and then in terms of skills. Amazon is a contemporary witness of this traditional HRM: the administrator technique optimises the preparation and delivery of orders and employees are operators on their overboards, to-ing and fro-ing as the wind blows and as dictated by instructions from a ‘smart’ wristband. The optimisation technique affords little consideration to human beings and their needs… even psychological: the ‘peegate’ scandal revealed that Amazon operators did not have time to urinate and so filled up bottles in their vans [20]. The context of the decades of the 2010s and 2020s is different: demographically, economically and socially. Digitalisation, robotisation, acceleration, erosion of solidarity, individualisation and solitude characterise our era and the issues that must be faced by companies and their management [13, 14, 21]. Whilst ‘motivation’ is an issue that is addressed in bureaucracies and the Taylorist organisations of the twentieth century, contemporary issues are different and touch more upon questions of meaning and recognition at work [22].

2.3 Resources, not humans

What is rather surprising is that HRM does not define ‘what’ the human resources at the heart of its activities actually ‘are’. The majority of definitions proposed present HRM as an activity and a set of theories allowing the organisation of work and the orientation of behaviours (such as through training or assessment) to ensure that the human resources are as productive as possible in terms of the quantity and quality of work [23]. Humans are resources to be mobilised as efficiently as possible so that they contribute to the company’s economic performance. Sometimes, the analogy is intended as more financial than economic when it considers humans as ‘capital’ in which to invest [24]. In 2018, the results of a phenomenological analysis of the underlying notion of the human being in the nine best-selling HRM manuals (six Anglo-Saxon and three French) were published [7]. They revealed that these nine manuals widely used in HRM teaching only promoted one single vision of humans: ‘that of an economic variable, a resource that needs to be exploited as efficiently as possible to generate maximum economic value’. Now, however, whilst considering humans as a ‘resource’ helped to legitimise the field of HRM by establishing a link (theoretically at least) between HRM policies and company performance in the years 1980–1990, today it is this way of considering humans that dehumanises work and erodes the legitimacy of HRM.

Finally, it is therefore the reduction of the human being to the state of a resource that has been rejected. In a society of loneliness and isolation [14], in companies where employees work from home and lose themselves in anonymous open spaces, there re-emerges a need to belong to a community and be recognised as a human being. As evidence of this, I cite the numerous projects led by HR departments in the months which followed the end of the Covid-19 pandemic to ‘reconnect’ their employees to one another and above all to the company. Some believe that we are facing a profound crisis in the meaning of work, when we observe the mass resignation phenomena in North America [25], whilst noting more marked and frequent career breaks [26]. One thing is certain, traditional HRM is no longer impressing workers who are seeking meaning and companies that are seeking sustainable performance.

2.4 Humane management: core principles

The Humane Management offering feeds on the criticisms of traditional HRM. It was formulated in universities and founded on a theoretical level before becoming popular with practitioners of HRM who adopted it (sometimes clumsily, substituting ‘Humane Management’ for ‘HRM’ but advocating the same practices). This sudden popularity came as a considerable shock. When I took the time, with Anne Dietrich, professor at the University of Lille (France), to publish a textbook bringing together the work that I had been doing for years to found Humane Management [27], our modest ambition had been to write a manual supporting the teachings of HRM in our universities. Very quickly, human resource managers – in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Quebec – snapped up this manual. As did a large number of organisation and management consultants. Today, Humane Management is taught in several French-speaking universities and is practised and recommended daily in an increasing number of companies. The key to this rapid adoption of the offering lies in the solid theoretical pillars the textbook provides, thereby making it possible to ‘apply words and indisputable arguments to the convictions we already had’, to paraphrase many HR managers who took the time to read the manual and give me their feedback.

As this involves a critical analysis of traditional human resource management, the process undertakes a systematic presentation of the traditional and mainstream approaches in HRM, to then demonstrate its limitations (in methodological, epistemological, theoretical and practical terms), before suggesting alternatives that support a renewed approach to HRM – that is Humane Management. It is therefore an approach that is intended to be complementary to those that already exist and have been institutionalised within the field of HRM and organisational behaviour (see Table 1). Humane Management feeds and shares some of the firm beliefs that are aligned with a humanist and sustainable perspective of the economy and society. It is then a matter of considering that (i) the end goals of company management are multiple. The end goal of management is as much about recognition for and the meaning of work as about short-term financial performance, (ii) the purpose of Humane Management is the real, concrete and living work that workers do and from which they draw a part of their recognition and the meaning of their work, (iii) workers and other stakeholders in the process shape the management of persons and work organisation, which means that they are not passive resources but instead reflective beings, who learn from their experiences and take conscious decisions. To conclude, Humane Management contributes to the rehumanisation of work, organisations and management by means of a professionalisation in the quality of management of persons and work organisation. After all, managing men and women is a responsibility that calls for specific expertise and (more) humanist management models.

Based on the detailed study of the transformations of work, organisation and management that are in progress and the combination of varied disciplines (management, economics, philosophy, psychology and sociology), the proposal for a Humane Management has been robustly formulated, both in theory and in practice. This alternative is founded on a few major principles that are a response to the limitations of traditional HRM [22].

1. A special notion of the human, that of reflexivity, i.e. the capacity and desire we have to understand and act according to our rules for common life, in the company (rather than a notion whereby human beings – reduced to the condition of resources – must put up with and respond to the methods and processes deployed by others). Being reflexive means being able to make judgements on your own work and that of others and to define – along with others – the standards governing good work. In concrete terms, it is about leaving experts to define the quality criteria that will be used to assess their work. This anthropological presupposition on which Humane Management is based is borrowed to the philosophy of Axel Honneth, who believes that what makes humanity is our ability to give recognition to others and in the expectation of recognition that we have [28]. As recognition involves judgement, it incarnates the identity dimension of the work and the profession. Considering people at work as reflective beings means it is imperative to organise spaces for discussion on work, to share the decisions that affect the work [29].

2. The consideration of real work as performed and experienced by all workers (executives, workers, trade union representatives, shareholders, holders of public office etc.) as the central focus of Humane Management. Here it is important to consider that experience of work is at once objective (measurable: results, skills, time, spaces), collective (collaboration, identification with the collective, articulation of private and professional life) and subjective (meaning and nonsense, recognition and denial of recognition, emancipation and resistance, giving and the absence of reciprocation). In concrete terms, Humane Management practices make an effort to cover all three dimensions of experience of work. Traditional HRM tends to overinvest in objective work. From the Humane Management perspective, it is a question of taking all dimensions of work into consideration.

3. A first end goal is recognition at work and not exclusively contribution to an economic or financial performance. First of all, it is a matter of recognising the multiple end purposes for the company and its management – a long-established fact thanks to the vast wealth of works carried out in corporate sustainability management. This is then followed by a question of prioritising and promoting recognition to top priority via application of Humane Management policies. Again, this has resulted from the philosophy of German philosopher Axel Honneth (see above).

Drawing on these core principles and assumptions, Humane Management can be defined as a group of human and social activities (practical and discussion) and theories aimed at including both men and women in an organisation project. Human beings are considered as reflective beings, that is, beings who contribute to defining the standards for collective action according to which their actions and those of a work community will be assessed. This perspective translates a collective search for confidence in these standards, in others and in the self. The purpose of Humane Management is work, and its end goal is recognition.

This special consideration afforded to human beings (as opposed to the notion of people as resources), to work and to recognition justifies a Humane Management that designates both people who are managed (human beings) and also the way in which they must be managed: in alignment with human dignity. In so doing, Humane Management gives concrete form to a criticism of HRM, renewing and completing some of the traditional HRM founding principles and characteristics (see Table 1). Firstly, because it is a matter of denaturalising the dominant end purpose of the management of people in the company. Secondly because Humane Management questions and adds to a professional ethics in a norm-based context. By also considering the approach to managing – beyond mere processes and tools – Humane Management takes on an awareness of the effect that it can have on the lives of men and women, both at work and beyond. The responsibility of people who carry it out is therefore great and demands an ethics and excellence which this critical questioning has the merit of marking out in ethical terms.

	HRM	Humane management
Organising principle	To contribute to the economic performance of the company	To (re)humanise work
End goals	To create (economic) value	To produce meaning and recognition at work
Principle of coherence – source of legitimacy	To justify the ROI of HR practices and policies implemented	To ensure that HR practices and policies are fair, show respect for individuals and make sense
Objects	Individuals, groups, performance (indicators), management practices and policies	Work and professions (professional expertise), workers
Key stakeholders	Strategic HR department, HR department, HRBP, people managers	Empathetic manager, HR manager who is a strategist (political actor)

Table 1.

HRM and humane management: complementarities and differences.

Adapted from [22].

3. Discussion

Humane Management is not the only ‘alternative’ proposal to HRM. Other perspectives have developed in recent years, including the sustainable human resource management, alongside other broader perspectives such as humanistic management, for example. So, what makes the specificity of this proposal and why does it seem to be mobilised more by HR professionals – where other alternatives seem to be confined to academic spheres?

The so-called sustainable HRM brings together a varied number of contributions that aimed all, in one way or another, at integrating the sustainable development goals into the management of human resources and at raising HRM awareness and then measuring HR-related activities in terms of economic, social and environmental impact [30]. Perceived as a ‘green’ version of traditional HRM, Kramar [31] identifies six constitutive elements of sustainable HRM: (1) identifying tensions between different organisational outcomes, (2) building the workforce in terms of capabilities and performance, (3) admitting to the negative and positive impacts that some HRM activities might hold, (4) dedicating attention to developing and adopting HRM activities, (5) having a straightforward statement containing ethics and values about Sustainable HRM and (6) developing metrics destined to promote effective change in society, mainly at the organisational, ecological and economic levels.

This perspective places sustainable HRM at a strategic but operational level. One could argue that HRM’s instrumentation and foundations do not change, while reporting activities expand. This is what emerges from the study by Cooke and her colleagues [32]. Proposing to extend the perspective of sustainable HRM, they promote sustainable management that is human-centred and thus constitutes a sustainable competitive advantage. In order to ‘centre’ management on people, the authors propose investing in human capital through training, particularly in terms of soft skills and a strong focus on well-being at work.

Most of these works actually extend the perspective of the resource. Investing in ‘capital’ means planning resources while being attentive to the return on investment. Resources must be administered by innovating in terms of content (well-being, soft skills and environmental and social performance indicators) without changing perspective (see e.g. [33]). The potential for renewal of HRM remains low [34].

From an even more societal perspective, Dominic Melé is the pioneer, with others, of an ethical perspective of management, including human resources, which is more oriented towards the common good [35]. Economists, sociologists, managers, ethicists contribute to a rich research perspective which conceives in particular the employment relationship as a dynamic of gift [36, 37, 38]. Where the company and its management work for the common good. If we are very far here from instrumental perspectives (such as the psychological contract or human capital), this perspective also seems to live in the academic sphere more than in the business world and suffers, this time, from a lack of anchoring in concrete practices. How can HR directors appropriate this vision and convince their board to transform organisations and their management, beyond aspects of communication?

Humane Management shares the anthropological foundations of humanistic approaches to management and the sincerity of a renewal project. It also gives itself the means through a pragmatic perspective, rooted in management research and its practice, without sinking into the simple rebranding of old practices. And without giving in to the ‘overhumanisation’ depicted by Linhart [13] by placing the sole responsibility for the transformation of organisations and their management on the shoulders of leaders.

3.1 Managing humanely in practice

Making a commitment to the path of Humane Management requires diagnostics work – which is quite coherent with the principle of contextualisation that characterises this approach. Three main questions can be asked:

• How are human beings onsidered in my organisation? As regards the way of managing people, are human beings considered as reflective beings? Do they play a part in defining the ‘rules of the game’? Are they involved in defining standards for action, for example work assessment criteria and what constitutes ‘good’ work?

• Do the HRM policies contribute to providing recognition? If not, or not sufficiently, how can they be redefined (content, systems, stakeholders involved, criteria used, etc.) so that they integrate more of this end goal?

• Do the HRM policies and practices cover all dimensions of work (objective, collective, subjective)? If some dimensions are absent or over-emphasised, how can this imbalance be rectified and how can we ensure that each policy and the set of practices cover all dimensions of work?

Once the diagnostics have been performed, we need to identify the dimensions on which action is needed. Promoting Humane Management therefore means developing a positive vision of the company and work, by replacing work and the worker at the heart of the company and its value creation. It is about having the courage to make empathy a management principle and reflectiveness (on its practices, the policy of your company) a daily practice. An attitude that is expected by workers from whom more is demanded now than ever before, in terms of skills, commitment and adaptability.

Lastly, Humane Management translates into a certain number of principles for action on an organisational and collective action level as well as the level of the individual and the commitment of each to man management or company management practices (human resources, accounting, finance, strategy, production and marketing). With a goal of improving the work of each individual, promoting general well-being within a collective and preserving health at work, these principles require certain attitudes and aptitudes:

• strong ethics, bringing the manager to follow the rules and conventions in force, so as to be exemplary and integral, but also a demonstrable conviction in care for others as human beings. This attitude, which involves an approach and a choice, inspires trust but also calls for other steps of vigilance;

• a comprehensive attitude of being prepared to vigilantly listen to and observe men and women at work, so as to favour an in-depth knowledge of real work, its complexity and its difficulties;

• critical distancing, that is, the practice of reflectiveness towards management systems and instructions from higher management to allow them to be better adapted to the contingencies of real work and to meet the targets set.

Finally, and despite the fact that Humane Management is developed at the organisational and management level (for organising human work), it encourages a particular style of managing: with goodness (in French, ‘bienveillance’ what is better translated in the management literature by empathy). Goodness, or empathy, does not typify human nature as generosity or altruism; rather it is an attitude, a conscious choice made. It therefore is the product of the ordinary reflexivity of ‘leaders’ and translates a project for the emancipation of certain (dehumanising) working conditions, of a certain form of corporate governance (disembodied) and a certain method of company management (financialised). Goodness is a demanding attitude, it is a choice that requires a certain amount of courage, the courage to make moral choices about what seems beneficial for the common good or good as regards the upholding of human dignity.

4. Conclusion

While criticisms of HRM are on the rise, Humane Management constitutes an avenue that both HR researchers and professionals seem to adopt where it has been developed, i.e. in French-speaking countries such as France, Belgium, Canada or Switzerland. Humane Management consists of a way of conceiving and operating the management of persons and work in organisations. It provides a certain number of markers that allow these practices to generate recognition, because they are anchored in and promote real work. But this is also a story of men and women who are taking up a courageous, positive and emancipating attitude – which through their daily actions and the end goal with which they mobilise existing management practices will give meaning to the work of their peers as well as to their own, and will produce recognition that in turn generates trust, commitment and respect.