The prosecutor report on the France Télécom suicides describes the reach of toxic management guided by greed and extreme competitiveness

By Milagros Pérez Oliva

The warning was clear: “you can be certain that I am going to make you leave one way or another, if not through the door, through the window”. That was the way in which Didier Lombard, an ambitious and prompt executive, talked about dismissals. He was determined to convert France Télécom, the main French telephone company, with 110,000 employees, whatever the cost. Reading the report from the prosecutor of Paris, who has just requested the prosecution of Lombard and six other executives for moral harassment, makes you shiver.

It all started back in 2006, in a meeting celebrated in Paris called by Lombard to “motivate” his executives in order to fulfil the projected reconversion plan: “In three years, 22,000 employees must leave the company and another 14,000 must have changed their destination”, he said. And terror emerged. There are toxic executives who turn to toxic methods to reach their goals. In the case of France Télécom, this has become the paradigm of a soulless type of management (literally) that prioritizes optimization of benefits on any other considerations. And, clearly, it puts it before employees’ rights and benefits. It is a backward concept that some business schools denigrate as they do not incentive productivity.

Of course, there is no better way to increase production and submission than terror. But things got out of hand for France Télecom executives as, besides being toxic, the method was perverse: it consisted on linking middle-management wages to the achieving dismissal goals. In other words, the closer they got to these goals, the larger the bonus: each dismissal would increase the bonus.

Greed, encouraged from the top level of the company, led to several ways of pressing employees: from moving a mother to a location two hours’ drive away from her children’s school, to degrading tasks of the role. But the most definitive was the empty chair method: moving staff once and again and leaving the “victim” with no table, nor chair nor destination for weeks, until they would “soften”. The prosecutor has gathered infamous e-mails and extremely cruel quotes. Those training middle management used to celebrate that “the method is working”.

The working environment quickly degraded. The prosecutor describes the terror that employees used to feel when, on Fridays’ afternoons they would get those terrible e-mails in which they were told how profitable it could be to work, for instance, in apiculture.  In 2008 and 2009 there were 35 suicides. By 2010, the number reached 60. Most of those who took their own lives wanted to clearly state the reason: many killed themselves in their own office and almost all of them left farewell letters. One of them even burst in an executives’ meeting with a knife staged in his belly, in hara-kiri style. Others made Lombard’s metaphor true and, before leaving through the door, they rather throw themselves through a window.

In 2009, unions informed against the executive board for putting other people’s lives in danger with their brutal methods. In 2010, a criminal investigation was initiated. The prosecutor’s report has made it clear that the atmosphere of terror had the goal of “psychologically destabilizing employees”. Suicides were just the tip of a huge iceberg that included dozens of attempts, depression leaves, and anxiety crisis. The prosecutor’s report grossly describes were extreme competitiveness can lead to in the society of performance.

How many other companies use similar methods? How many companies provide bonus incentives for staff cutbacks and the degradation of the working environment? The case of France Télécom, which in 2013, after Lombard left, absorbed the British company Orange and took its name, did not happen out of the blue. It is part of a trend that Zygmunt Bauman describes this way: “Progress has turned into a sort of endless and uninterrupted game of musical chairs in which a moment of inattention results in irreversible defeat and irrevocable exclusion. Instead of great expectations and sweet dreams, progress evokes an insomnia full of nightmares of “being left behind”, missing a train or falling out of the window of a fast accelerating vehicle”. If this happens on general basis, what may not happen in companies ran by toxic executives such as Lombard.

This column was originally published by the newspaper El País.