In September 2008, a consultant writes to the Élysée to propose measuring well-being at work as one measures operating profit. He belongs to no party, no institution, no school. The indicator he described in that letter exists today, bears the name he gave it, and rests on an observatory of social data numbering in the hundreds of millions. Here is the trajectory, and the documents that date it.
Victor Waknine is an engineer, a graduate of Polytech Lille. He held general-management positions for some twenty-five years in public and private companies — Orange, the Matra-Lagardère group, then Lehman Brothers, where he was senior advisor EMEA for responsible-finance investments. He founded Mozart Consulting in 2004. Nothing in that career as an engineer and executive destined him to spend the following twenty years on the question of workplace suffering.
He himself tells the story of the turning point. In September 2008, he hears on television a former counterpart from his professional life, now head of a major telecommunications group, answer a question about the suicides in his company by saying that the matter fell under human resources — he himself, he explained, being paid to do finance, innovation and strategy. Waknine describes a shock. He then redirects the firm he had founded in 2004 towards a single question: how to make disengagement visible to those with the power to address it.
What strikes one about what follows is the speed. The shock is from September 2008. The letter to the Élysée is dated the 22nd of the same month.
These four documents, kept in my working archives, make it possible to date precisely the birth of the IBET and the way its designer chose to carry it. I present them here for what they are, without reproducing them: they belong to their author.
Letter from Victor Waknine, managing director of Mozart Consulting, addressed to the Élysée under the title “Travailler mieux pour vivre mieux© — Concevoir les indicateurs du bien-être au travail” (“Working better to live better© — Designing indicators of well-being at work”).
This is the birth certificate of the concept, and the most striking document of the four. Everything is already there. The economic argument first: paid but non-worked days then represented, according to the labour minister quoted in the press, a cost of sixty billion euros a year — more than France's budget deficit. Then the four questions of recognition, which will become the spine of the method: does our employer know us; is our expertise recognised in practice; is our engagement recognised; what really is our contribution to overall performance, and how is it measured. Finally the diagnosis: systems founded on the individualisation of tasks and on autonomy stand in the way of a holistic view of the person, and create a gap between the perceived and the lived.
Above all, the letter sets out the strategy that will not change: the only actors able to alter the course of things are neither the victims nor their witnesses, but shareholders and executives — and those hear only one framework, economics. Hence the need for an indicator. The acronym appears in full in the text: IBET, Indicateur du Bien Être au Travail (Well-being at Work Indicator). And already the formula that will become his signature.
Two letters from the Presidency of the Republic, signed by the chief of staff.
The first, dated 2 October 2008, acknowledges receipt. The second, from 5 May 2009, addresses the substance: it states that the suggestion of creating a well-being-at-work indicator has drawn attention, and notes the installation, on the previous 30 April, of the Working Conditions Orientation Council. One cannot of course conclude from such a letter that Waknine's initiative bore on that decision. What it does establish, more modestly and more surely, is that in 2008-2009 an isolated practitioner carried this question to the highest level of the State, and his proposal was read.
Commission composed of UMP and Nouveau Centre members of parliament and qualified public figures, co-chaired by Jean-François Copé and Pierre Méhaignerie, co-rapporteurs Jean-Frédéric Poisson and Olivier Jardé.
Waknine is heard there on his “Travailler mieux pour vivre mieux©” methodology and files a complete documentation with the commission. He appears in the final report among the persons heard, on page 57: “Monsieur Victor WAKNINE, Gérant de la société de conseil Mozart Consulting”. Let us specify the exact nature of this participation, which is that of an expert heard and not of a committed contributor: the report also contains signed contributions from members of the commission, among whom he does not appear.
The report itself deserves to be read even today. It refuses at the outset the conflation of suffering and work — “work is not suffering”, and the absence of work is often one of the great causes of suffering —, notes that the absence of reliable indicators is itself problematic, and observes the French lag in awareness. Three findings that coincided exactly with the proposal heard in November.
Press release responding to the spokesperson of the Socialist Party, Alain Vidalies, author of a communiqué of 15 December 2009.
The Socialist Party then presents its conclusions on workplace suffering under a heading identical to Mozart Consulting's slogan, filed with the INPI on 17 April 2008. Waknine responds with a communiqué requesting that this use cease. It is not a political stance: it is a defence of intellectual property, and the central argument speaks volumes about the man. His consulting and training work in the prevention of occupational risks, he writes, presupposes an accreditation conditional on a single requirement — practising in full independence from pressure groups, political parties, trade unions and religious organisations.
Taken together, these four documents sketch not a political engagement but a method. In fifteen months, the same man writes to the President of the Republic, is heard by a commission of the then-majority, and asks the opposition to stop using his concept. He knocks on every door and enters no house.
The indicator described in the 2008 letter was built. It is called IBET©, it is registered, and it rests on a simple equation: the engagement index added to the rates of disengagement equals one. It is calculated without a questionnaire, from existing social data, which distinguishes it from declarative barometers. One index point equals one percent of the wage bill — this conversion into euros is what makes disengagement visible in the only language Waknine judged, in 2008, likely to be heard.
The national series exists since 2009. The partnership with the APICIL group dates from 2011. The work has been certified as social innovation by the Finance Innovation competitiveness cluster, by inter-company mediation, and by the BPI Group Leadership Institute. In 2020, Mozart Consulting became a subsidiary of Territoria Mutuelle, part of the APICIL group; the firm's shareholding may have evolved since. The observatory had accumulated, as of the last public state consulted, on the order of one hundred and sixty million pieces of social data covering eight million employees.
The question has not aged. The national IBET measured in 2024 stands at 0.72 — the level the scale describes as exhaustion. Long after the letter to the Élysée, the issue Waknine announced as “a major social one for the next ten years” is not behind us.
A mutual friend had invited him to present his IBET to the ESSEC alumni association one day in 2010. He spoke with great conviction, while projecting a perfectly unreadable slide. The scene had amused me, but what he was saying had drawn my attention enough that I invited him for a coffee. We started talking, and have not stopped since.
I am not a co-author of the IBET. The trademark, the method and the developments belong to Victor Waknine and Mozart Consulting, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. What I have brought is of another register: a questioning of the foundations of the approach — where the idea comes from that a collective produces something other than the sum of its members, what the psychology of valorisation, the anthropology of the gift and the long history of constraint make it possible to say about it, and under what conditions a measure can inscribe itself in a broader vision of society without becoming yet another instrument.
Our two trajectories met on this precise point: he was seeking to make disengagement measurable, I was seeking to understand why organisations produce it. Neither of these two paths suffices on its own.
Victor Waknine's articles and interviews are made available on this site with his agreement, for direct reading and download. The IBET approach is also presented on the home page. Victor Waknine took part in the closing dialogue of L'engagement collectif dans l'entreprise (L'Harmattan, 2019) and wrote the foreword to Indice de bien-être au travail (L'Harmattan, 2024); we also both contributed to Démocratie(s) en action — see the contributions page.
Victor Waknine's articles and interviews are reproduced on this site with his agreement, on a dedicated page. The other documents mentioned here belong to other authors — the Presidency of the Republic for its replies, the Commission of Inquiry for its report; those are quoted and situated, not reproduced.