“Here the manager takes care of us and we take care of the rest” : It is impossible to miss this slogan, displayed on a large blue sign at the entrance to a production island at Michelin’s Roanne (Loire) site. Pierre Villeneuve, hired in 2014 as an auditor and now a multi-skilled operator, often agrees with this phrase: “We can work properly and without pressure, while making daily decisions. We have objectives, we have to meet them, but I have never had a boss here. You don’t come to work with a knot in your stomach.”
This factory, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary in September 2024, produces 4,000 high-performance tyres every day. Its 841 employees, who have a tradition of systematically shaking hands, have also taken on tasks that go beyond their jobs: in each team, some take on the role of “correspondents” for safety and quality… This makes it possible to work. The groups directly manage the daily work, and the manager only intervenes when there is a problem that the team members cannot solve.
Giving employees more autonomy in order to offer them more varied and rewarding work is far from a new idea: for fifteen years now, the concept of the liberated company has been used to designate the – very rare – companies that have chosen to reduce the number of intermediate hierarchies. It is clear that this philosophy is stagnant and has never been sustained in the large structures that have put it to the test (Auchan, Decathlon, etc.).
That’s why at Michelin we prefer to talk about“empowering organization”to designate this new way of considering work groups. For twenty years, the multinational has been experimenting with this in all its centres, on the scale of production islands of around thirty people each.
In Roanne, the company did not remove its bosses overnight and did not push forward this new management exclusively for the benefit of its employees. Since a “responsiveness agreement” signed in 2015 with most of the trade union organisations, the factory has completely reoriented its activity and adopted a more flexible mode of operation to adapt to customer requests… and not disappear.
The management transition
The aim was therefore to increase productivity: since the factory operates twenty-four hours a day and the managers are only present during the day, the teams – each island – are subdivided into five teams with a changing schedule (several days in a row in the morning, then in the afternoon, sometimes in the evening and at weekends) – must, by definition, be autonomous.
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