Quality of Work Life in Small sized Companies

This paper summarizes several years of team research-intervention in very small businesses. Quality of working life is at the heart of the organization's social performance, with a strong impact on its economic performance. VSEs are little-explored companies and not very accessible to researchers, as they are often invisible in the social field and have less opportunity to call on researchers. As a result of globalization, rising living standards and education, employees' expectations of work have changed. Small businesses, which are sometimes less attractive in terms of pay or internal career development, now need to take advantage of other levers linked to quality of life at work. Executives and managers of very small businesses are poorly trained in these issues, and can make critical mistakes when it comes to absenteeism, staff turnover and motivation in the workplace. VSE managers' quality of work life is also virtually absent from social debates, which focus on employees' quality of life. Yet VSE managers face particular pressures with regard to their quality of work life. In this paper, we have sought to summarize our observations in a scientific manner, illustrating them with a few verbatims from our numerous case studies, while focusing on elements that could help VSE managers to improve their quality of life at work.