In an opinion piece published in Les Echos on 15 February (“Pourquoi la SNCF regarde passer les trains” – Why SNCF watches the trains go by), somewhat harsh but well argued and illustrated, the sociologist François Dupuy points to the difficulties SNCF, France’s state-owned railway, faces in achieving its “service revolution”. In his view, the public company is an endogenous organisation (turned in on itself), which will only succeed in this “revolution” by touching “the essential: its organisation or, to put it plainly, the way its staff work”.
The special status of the vast majority of railway workers (a few escape it…) and the way work is organised for many of them are, we too are convinced, considerable handicaps as transport opens up to competition. And we await with curiosity, even intellectual relish (but also concern), the regulatory solutions that would allow “new entrants” in regional rail transport to take on the SNCF staff usually assigned to TER regional trains… Because can what exists in urban transport (the transfer of staff when a public service delegation contract changes hands) be transposed to “real” railway workers?
One can imagine the perplexity of Veolia/Transdev (or of DB, or of the Swiss CFF…) faced with the managerial and economic challenge such a “forced” transfer of staff would represent… and, if the transfer did not take place, the fears of SNCF, which for three years now has already had to find ways to “redeploy” staff from its Fret (freight) division, for example, whose markets have been taken by competitors.
But there are, in our view, difficulties other than the cost of railway labour that the “service revolution” must take into account – in particular the following three.
Railway workers don’t like soft sciences
The first difficulty lies in the deeply “engineering” nature of this company, which is expressed and reinforced in a “safety culture” (fortunately for us passengers).
Running trains may seem simple; it is in fact incredibly complex, when you think about it a little. It starts with making sure that metal wheels running on rails can move tons of equipment and passengers at high speed with a satisfactory energy balance… and it continues, for example, with organising movements in the “paths” (the time-space slots in which the infrastructure is available) of a meshed network that in most cases carries TGVs, Corail intercity trains, TER regional trains and even RER suburban trains, freight trains… and therefore trains travelling at different speeds. In this respect, seeing a “train graph” is a revelation for the novice…
The talent of SNCF’s engineers is therefore both real and necessary. But this historic dominance, which the company has been trying to balance for more than ten years by recruiting Sciences Po graduates and salespeople – “yoghurt sellers”, as some say – also has its drawbacks.
French engineers do not like “soft sciences” (see the Institut Montaigne’s proposals to “adapt the training of our engineers to globalisation”), because they are uncertain by nature… And when uncertainty concerns people’s safety, this leads to an absolute rejection of that approach.
That is rather reassuring when it comes to operations. But when such a “culture” permeates every part of the company, it can lead to rigidities, even deadlock. When you have to work on staff flows, in a context of open markets, pension reform and changing trades, you must necessarily be able to work amid uncertainty – and imprecise information does not necessarily express a wish to conceal. And when you want to work in genuine partnership with actors outside the company – local authorities, businesses, associations… – you cannot expect them to behave in a perfectly predictable, “rational” (in terms of the company’s stakes) or obedient way…
In both these cases, as in so many others, you have to be able to work with the uncertain: identify risks, imagine different scenarios, adopt a flexible, open, non-dogmatic stance to seize opportunities and foster synergies…
This, then, is in our view a profound transformation the company must accomplish, with its staff: accepting to work in the uncertainty that characterises the world of the “soft sciences” – and quite simply the world of human beings – while the world of machines tries, without fully succeeding, to attain the perfection of the “hard sciences”.
How to prioritise the customer relationship without the conviction that customers must be won
The second difficulty is openness to others, in the sense of the customer – who, incidentally, rarely pays the full cost of their journey and rightly feels they own the company, though this hardly justifies the arrogant behaviour of an “owner” (but that is a broader subject…).
SNCF has invested massively in its Université du Service (its in-house service academy); staff are supported and software tools multiplied to give passengers/customers a better quality of service.
Beyond this notable progress – because while information no doubt remains imperfect, those with the privilege of age can only note that, on board trains as at ticket counters, the quality of contact bears no comparison with what we used to know (and still encounter, for example, with department-store “sales assistants”) – there no doubt remains a painful revolution to accomplish: that of winning customers.
Opening up to competition currently appears to many of the company’s staff as only a distant and/or improbable prospect. Unawareness or denial? Yet the arrival of competitors in passenger traffic is a reality, as it was in freight. Back then, people at Fret would say “nobody will come, it’s too complicated, it isn’t profitable”… Today, the answers are of the same kind, or they are taboo, a paralysis.
To explain the reluctance towards this inevitable change, there are no culprits – only a past that permeates minds, and a natural human tendency to put off the moment of rupture, of change, when it forces people to question themselves.
France Telecom/Orange went through it, painfully, in France. I remember a shop “sales assistant” who fled in tears, shouting in front of astonished customers: “but I never asked to deal with people…”
Between handing out tickets as the sole operator – with a smile is better – and giving customers (no longer “users”) the arguments and services that will make them choose your offer rather than a competitor’s, there is a change of world that sales or customer-relations training cannot fully support.
To succeed in this revolution, one must also realise that one’s job, pay, working conditions and career prospects… are linked to the quality of the service provided, and one must want it – some say you have to “be hungry”, others favour a sense of service to others, even of public service. And then also (and above all?), one must want contact and exchange with others, whereas these are not natural inclinations for everyone.
Status rather than commitment
The third transformation challenge is linked to the points raised by François Dupuy. One cannot ignore that some railway workers with the special “statut” are not there by vocation (mobility, public service, regional development…) but because of the appeal of guaranteed employment (including – and no doubt mechanically, given the promotion system – among managers and perhaps sometimes senior managers).
In a tight economic context, public employment becomes a Holy Grail for many, and SNCF jobs are seen as just such havens of security and stability. Mobilising these “opportunistic” staff then becomes a matter of absolute uncertainty, weighing as much on the figures as on teams’ ability to fulfil their missions, within an “ideal” organisation designed by the company’s bright minds and their super-consultants bearing the best international “benchmark” practices…
Like State services and local authorities, which must cope with shrinking resources under similar human-resources constraints, SNCF could not, in a “normal” world, rule out ending employment under the special “statut”. But in France today, this prospect is hardly imaginable…
One might therefore consider this a constraint rather than a necessary revolution. Let us instead consider it a major managerial challenge, from recruitment to career management, in good times and bad.
Finally, François Dupuy points to the stance of an SNCF “fixated on its product” (carrying passengers by rail). While the article’s other points are accurate, this one understates the efforts made by SNCF – the group… But it is true that this revolution, too, remains to be completed. And here again, organisational changes will not be enough to encourage the revolution in minds that is the indispensable corollary of the revolution in practices.
So, to lead this company through these necessary transformations, and with these major constraints, one understands why its Chairman was named “manager of the year”, despite the reactions of some unions and the disruption of the winter… knowing that his talent will be very useful in the years to come.
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