A break in the relationship with work? The Covid-19 pandemic and the timing of career management by employees[Une rupture dans le rapport au travail ? La pandémie de Covid-19 et les temporalités de gestion de leur parcours par les salariés]

The Covid crisis is reputed to have caused a break in the relationship with work of many employees, who would have drawn the consequences through a marked change in their career paths. The article questions this hypothesis based on fifteen interviews from employees of Belgian private and public companies, collected in early 2021 in a collaborative research design. We consider the relationship to work and the choices made by individuals in their careers by placing them at the crossroads of organizational, professional and family standards that individuals strive to accord. Our results show the crisis has especially amplified and precipitated reflections that play out over longer time frames. The distance from the business and the continued association of family members has imposed an increased weight on family norms and forced a restructuring of balances with organizational norms, now more obliged to deal with the former.