According to the World Health Organization, France suffers from a suicide rate higher than its neighbors: 17.6 suicides per 100 000 inhabitants. French men are more likely to take their own life (26.4 per 100 000) than French women (9.2 per 100 000). These are sad and sobering figures, and the fact that France outpaces its neighbors suggests that suicide prevention should be (even more of) a public health priority in France.

France Telecom, privatized in 1998, has more than 100 000 employees in France. In 2000, 28 of its employees committed suicide. Since the beginning of 2008, 23 France Telecom employees committed suicide, and another 13 attempted suicide.

One could reason that, although each individual suicide is tragic, the overall suicide rate among France Telecom personnel is not unusual. But no one is taking that position in France.

French media and conventional wisdom instead point to a suicide wave at France Telecom. After its privatization, France Telecom changed from a state-owned bureaucracy to a profit-oriented business. Its underlying businesses also changed dramatically, as the ascendancy of mobile communications and Internet access demonstrates.

French labor minister Xavier Darcos called in France Telecom CEO Didier Lombard for a serious discussion. Afterwards, they held a press conference announced measures that France Telecom would take.

Without minimizing the gravity of suicide or trying to find fault with France Telecom’s response, an opportunity to communicate has been misspent:

  • France Telecom “decided to immediately put in place a
    freephone number to promote dialogue. Psychologists from outside the
    company will be available to listen to and talk with any employees who
    may be having difficulties”. This might be an obvious initiative for a phone company, but it seems to me impersonal (a phone chat with someone “from outside the company”, not a personal meeting or a course of therapy) and guilt-inducing (because the focus is on “difficulties” that employees “may be having”).
  • The overall approach is bureaucratic, institutional, collective. For example, employee representatives will appoint an external consultancy to conduct an audit of the situation within France Telecom.
  • At the press conference, Lombard said that he wanted to put “a halt to this suicide trend [or fashion] which, obviously, shocks everyone”. (In French: point d’arrêt à cette mode de suicide qui, évidemment, choque tout le monde).
  • I’m troubled, because these remarks could be heard as suggesting greater concern with “everyone’s shock” than with suicidal employees.
  • Many were shocked by Lombard’s description of a suicide trend or fashion (the French word Lombard used is “mode“). In official communications, France Telecom talks about “recent events” and a “series of suicides”. Lombard later said (in French), “By mistake, I used the word ‘mode’, which was the translation of the word ‘mood’ in English.” Really?

I wonder whether people haven’t misunderstood the organizational behaviors involved. Conventional wisdom has it that employees have been put under greater stress since privatization. What I’d suggest is quite different: the world and France Telecom’s business have change, but France Telecom’s management style hasn’t. All of the above suggest to me a top-down, hierarchical, bureaucratic organization, much as you’d expect from a public utility in a highly regulated business, but at odds with our increasingly “flat”, horizontal, democratic society.