Denis Pennel
Recreating collectivity at work without denying the individual - Well-being at work is good, taking care of work is better! - How to boost energy at work?
Denis Pennel is a recognized specialist in work transformations and their impacts on managerial practices. His conviction is that work must regain its promise of emancipation in order to support the performance of companies. He is the author of several bestselling books (including "50 Tips to Regain Energy at Work" Eyrolles 2024 and "Work, the Thirst for Freedom" Eyrolles, 2017) and numerous articles on the labor market. A sought-after international speaker, he is ranked among the top 25 global influencers on the future of work (Thinkers360) and the top 50 thought leaders on the evolution of work (LeadersHum). Denis Pennel has over 30 years of experience in international public affairs and institutional communication, focusing on the evolution of work and human resources. Married and a father of two, he has dedicated his career to developing a better understanding of the evolution of the world of work and influencing employment policies on an international scale. He is the creator of the ACE© method, aimed at putting real work back at the center of managerial practices to foster engagement, trust, and pleasure at work, through 3 levers: 1) Framed autonomy 2) Individualized collectivity 3) Deliberate astonishment He is also a recognized expert within the APM (Association Progrès du Management) community and a trainer at Sciences Po Paris (Executive Programme). Denis Pennel was the General Director of the World Employment Confederation from 2005 to 2024. In this role, he was responsible for promoting the interests of the recruitment profession to the institutions of the European Union (Commission, Parliament, Council of Ministers) and major international organizations (International Labour Organization, OECD, World Bank…). Born in 1966, Denis Pennel graduated from the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. THEMES OF HIS CONFERENCES - How to recreate collectivity in an increasingly individualistic work world? - Stop taking care of your employees, instead fix their work - The consumer's paradise has become the worker's hell - Boosting energy at work to combat burnouts - Work, the thirst for freedom!
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- Conference : 5000 €
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My conferences
Stop taking care of your employees. Instead, fix their work!
We continue to treat disengagement as an HR problem. This is a diagnostic error. The real problem is the work itself. Its fragmentation. Its procedural absurdity. The lack of real autonomy. The constant management of urgency. The loss of engagement observed in all studies comes from there. It is not the employees who disengage. It is the way we organize and manage work that demotivates, exhausts, and disempowers. In trying to “take care” of employees, many companies avoid the only question that matters: 👉 Does work still allow individuals to grow, decide, learn, contribute, and be proud of what they produce? Work no longer emancipates when it becomes impossible to master. And no HR policy will sustainably compensate for poorly designed work. 🎙️ This is the focus of my new conference: “Stop taking care of your employees. Instead, fix their work.” I will decode: ✅why engagement collapses despite HR initiatives ✅what employees experience but no longer say ✅the managerial blind spots that silently destroy performance ✅how to rebuild work that empowers, develops, and helps grow! My goal is not to produce one more opinion on the future of work. It is to put precise words on an organizational malaise that many feel but few dare to name. Instead of asking yourself: “How to motivate employees?” Ask yourself: “How did we end up building organizations that prevent employees from doing their work properly?”
The Power of Collective Energy at Work
How is energy essential for recreating a collective in the workplace? 34% of French employees report being in a state of professional burnout. Work is becoming increasingly energy-consuming and generating existential fatigue. Acceleration, fragmentation, and intensification of work rhythms, the rise of individualism and the quest for autonomy, the dictate of performance: individuals find themselves alone in the face of physical fatigue and a growing mental load, negatively impacting their well-being at work. As a consequence, there is a decrease in motivation (absenteeism, low morale) and engagement (silent resignation, refusal of promotion) leading directly to a decline in work performance (low productivity). We have reached the limits of consumerist individualism: individuals find themselves alone with themselves and can no longer rely on anyone but themselves to succeed, build their lives, and give it meaning. However, the only collective that endures (outside of school) is the world of business where there is an obligation to coexist with people you did not choose: this is the basic social rule, the one that creates society! The company therefore has a key role to play in recreating and maintaining an inspiring collective! The solution: boost energy at work! Energy is what brings us together and allows us to recreate a collective in an increasingly individualistic work world. That is why it is essential to cultivate and spread it around us to promote well-being within the professional world. Energy stimulates motivation (training effect), fosters engagement (by developing a sense of belonging, "I want to be part of it"), generates pleasure in working together ("I am part of a moving team"), facilitating openness to others (vitality that spreads around) ultimately increasing performance!
Employers-Employees: The Great Divergence?
The conference covers the following points: ● Information on the evolution of individuals' place and expectations regarding work: individualization, work-life balance, quest for meaning, thirst for autonomy, desire for control over content and working conditions, aspiration for well-being ● Reflections on the consequences of these new aspirations and the changes in the labor market (demographic aging, consumerization of work, job polarization, etc.): how do they disrupt or hinder the development of my activities? How can I adapt to support the growth of my company? What role for management? ● Discussions on the best way to recruit and access sought-after talents: how to optimize my recruitment channels, what are the best practices to implement, how to make the best use of digital tools? ● Identification of practices and tools to promote engagement and motivation of existing teams: What are the motivation levers? What are the key factors for retention? How to reboost the energy of my teams?
The Consumer's Paradise Has Become the Worker’s Hell
The entry into the 21st century has marked a paradigm shift in our economic model: the transition from a mass economy to a demand-driven economy. Goodbye to the production of standardized goods, passive and captive consumers, limited choices, and waiting times. Since the 2000s, we have witnessed an insatiable and immediate thirst for consumption, where we only pay for what we consume, where use prevails over ownership, with personalized products, made on demand, and delivered to consumers. A new era where the consumer, now king, forces companies to reorganize to become more agile in order to meet the increasingly demanding desires of customers, thereby impacting the labor relationship to make it more malleable. A society of abundance, characterized by resource waste, a rise in inequalities within countries between those who can consume without moderation and others, and a race for more. This new capitalist model has been made possible by the alliance forged between consumers and shareholders. The latter have based their company's growth on bringing cheaper and cheaper goods and services to market, with planned obsolescence, responding to the insatiable thirst of consumers eager for more at the lowest cost. All of this has only been made possible through a frantic race to reduce costs, of which workers have been the first victims, through a decrease in real wages and an increasing insecurity of the labor relationship. A drift towards harmful consumerism, a source of the commodification of labor and a reduced lifespan of companies that, faced with volatile and fleeting consumers, also become goods that are bought and sold, disappearing here to be reborn there. This generalization of a demand-driven economy affects society as a whole, leading to communitarianism, tribalism, and short-term engagement. Now well identified, the ills associated with the development of this new capitalist model are beginning to inspire the emergence of remedies to address overproduction, overconsumption, overheating, and household over-indebtedness. The detox cure imposed on us by the coronavirus has accelerated the awareness of the need to sustainably change our consumption habits and the necessity to modify our impulsive buying behaviors. It has highlighted the fact that our linear, productivist model, based on four logics - extract, produce, consume, throw away - can no longer last. Our societal model must be rethought to become more inclusive and equitable, based on a social market economy where everyone finds their share and rightful place. A new evolution of capitalism, which will succeed its industrial phase, the information age, and lastly the reign of the individual. It is about establishing a new social contract to adapt it to the realities of the 21st century: the winning trifecta will involve modernizing our social protection system (to ensure fair redistribution), a renewed bargaining power for workers through new channels (to ensure decent working conditions), and the overhaul of our educational system (to restore the effectiveness of social mobility).
Work, the Thirst for Freedom
Over the past two decades, work has become polymorphic and plural: salaried work, independent work, but also now online work, consumer work, crowdworking, and volunteer work. While employment (defined as salaried work under a permanent contract) represented the normal and general form of work in the second half of the 20th century, today, work has emancipated itself from employment and from a hypertrophied and bureaucratized form of salaried work. Responding both to the need for agility from companies and to individuals' expectations for more freedom, employment has lost its appeal. The challenge today is to overcome the antagonism between different forms of work to build a new system of legal and social protection for all workers, regardless of their status. Establishing security at the scale of the labor market and freeing work from the constraints of employment to give everyone a chance: neither salaried work nor precarious work, long live Libertariat!
The Rise of the On-Demand Economy: What Consequences for Employment?
A tidal wave is currently shaking our society: the generalization of an on-demand economy, driven by consumer demands and facilitated by digitalization. This on-demand economy disregards time to provide real-time service, organized through fragmented production circuits that disrupt traditional business models. To survive and respond to their customers' whims, companies have adapted their production systems to gain flexibility and responsiveness: resorting to diverse and flexible forms of work, outsourcing and fragmentation of production methods, and utilizing freelance labor, leading to the emergence of a fragmented and off-ground company. It is time to rethink our social model based on salaried work to invent new forms of social protection corresponding to the resurgence of independent work and the increasing diversification of work forms. While the future may well resemble the past, it is not by trying to patch our current system that we will invent solutions that meet the challenges posed by this new industrial revolution.
How to Re-Humanize Work?
Intensification of tasks to be accomplished, stress management, burnout and boreout, increasing permeability between professional and private life, information overload: the world of work is affected by many ills that harm workers' motivation, endanger their health, and dehumanize relationships among employees. It is time to place humans back at the heart of management and business management.
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Who am I?
What made me become a speaker
Work experienced as a rite of passage that allowed me to overcome my vulnerabilities to become an internationally recognized author, speaker, and mentor.
Positioning & expertise
What concrete problem I can help your audience solve
Disengagement at work and loss of motivation
Why book me rather than another speaker?
My difference lies in my international experience and my deep knowledge and analysis of the changes in work
My specialty in one sentence
The impact of changes in work on managerial practices
The method, framework, or philosophy I stand for
Yes, I developed my ACE method, aimed at putting real work back at the center of managerial practices to foster engagement, trust, and enjoyment at work, through 3 levers: 1) Framed autonomy 2) Individualized collective 3) Deliberate astonishment