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Chapter written by Bernard GAZIER.
2
Employability as a Managerial Imperative?
As the contributions by Bernard Gazier and Bénédicte Zimmermann in this book (Chapter 1 and Chapter 3) show, employability is a political issue. It is a question of addressing the issue of long-term unemployment and exclusion from work, or of enabling workers to seize their career path to serve a project “of their own” in an emancipatory perspective.
One of the criticisms leveled at employability consists of denouncing the lack of responsibility on the part of companies with regard to career paths and in passing on to workers the consequences of their management decisions: workforce adjustments or job and skill changes. However, it is much more in a situation of employment and work than in a situation of unemployment that individuals have the resources and opportunities necessary to prepare sustainable career paths. Employers therefore have a role to play, at least as much as public employment services.
However, this role only becomes a management concern insofar as it can be linked to tangible results or “performance” for the organization. Without this, employability remains confined to issues of corporate social responsibility: we “do employability” because we are legally obliged to or because we feel concerned about the fate of the “victims” of economic change. The central argument of this contribution is to show that employability is not an optional concern for companies, but a managerial imperative. In order to do so, it will first discuss the way in which employee employability facilitates the ability of organizations to adapt to change, and then specify how employability is the subject of managerial approaches in “ordinary” HRM and in work organization practices.
2.1. Employability and change: the migration of a concept
Employability is the result of the encounter between the characteristics of the individual and the changing needs of the internal or external labor markets. However, and this is where the role of the company comes into play, this meeting is only made possible by the existence of public or managerial measures aimed at developing individuals or improving the functioning of the markets. The definition proposed by De Grip et al. (2004) has the advantage of integrating these different dimensions:
Employability involves the ability and willingness of employees to remain attractive in the labor market [supply factors], reacting to and anticipating changes in tasks and the work environment [demand factors], which is facilitated by the human resource development instruments available to it [role of institutions and organizations].
Figure 2.1. The three dimensions of employability, from De Grip et al. (2004)
This concept is in line with the “interactive employability” defined by Bernard Gazier (2012), whereas most studies on employability focus on individual factors, leaving in the background the elements linked to the context and in particular the levers available to organizations to improve employability – among their employees.
The attention paid by companies to employability has changed in intensity and nature over the past decades, reflecting the evolution of economic, technological and organizational changes. The issue has gradually shifted from a logic of participation in the effort to reduce or prevent long-term unemployment to the need to promote employee mobility in order to make the organization itself sufficiently mobile to seize the business opportunities that arise. These migrations of the concept can be summarized in four stages.
2.1.1. Employability, a matter of public policy
The notion of employability was initially associated with the fight against unemployment by public authorities, then by individuals and companies. The challenge is to encourage the participation of as many people as possible in the labor market or to manage, with parsimony, the eviction mechanisms. The least employable people may be exempted from job search (older or disabled employees, in particular) and benefit from redistribution mechanisms, but the idea is to promote the employment rate. Companies can participate by adapting their recruitment criteria. In the end, it is the consequences of the “accident of course“ that are considered in order to calibrate the efforts to be made in terms of social support or redeployment.
2.1.2. Employability as an employer’s responsibility in managing restructuring
Progressively, and particularly in France, employability has become an imperative in the context of responsible and effective management of restructuring. As soon as job security can no longer be guaranteed by the employer, the development of employability becomes a management imperative. Largely imposed by labor law, this imperative nevertheless rests on instrumental foundations in terms of social and financial (Garaudel et al. 2016), and also moral costs, the employer being responsible for the evolution of the professional value of employees (Dietrich 2010). It should also be noted that the literature abounds in showing that the fate reserved by the employer for the “victims” of restructuring largely determines the mobilization of the “survivors” (Datta et al. 2010). The legal frameworks of social plans, job protection plans (plans de sauvegarde de l’emploi, PSE), and more broadly of GPEC (strategic workforce and skills planning), are designed in this spirit: employers are invited to reduce the cost of restructuring for the community by anticipating and preparing employees for the possibility of professional mobility. Employability is an HRM and skills management issue (Loufrani-Fedida et al. 2015) and refers to the problem of maintaining employment and orchestrating internal mobility, which is no longer systematically upward.
2.1.3. Employability as an individual responsibility
Career paths are increasingly incorporating