Conclusion par Hervé Hélias, PDG de Mazars - Forum du réseau Happy Men Share More 2017

I'm sorry I couldn't be on the left, I was looking for a seat, but I will come listen to you. No problem. First, thank you for inviting me. I am very happy to be among you to share these conclusions of the APIM forum. I see many Mazars people at the back of the room and I am delighted. So I am delighted but I am a little worried because I think some might see it as an imposture, because when I look at the definition of APIM, I tell myself there are many, many, many boxes that I do not check. So, and I will start with that because I think it is important for you to understand that some of us who were not raised in that culture now live to support this APIM approach. So first, I am someone who has always worked a lot, traveled a lot, now and often to the detriment of my personal life, to the detriment of our leisure, but also to the detriment of my children, and I think I haven't always seen my children as I would have liked. The older ones, since I have two older ones, but I also have a little boy of two years, and I think today I do not devote enough time to him.

Then I also have a family situation that helped me a lot. My first wife chose to stop working very early to take care of our two daughters, so I was in extraordinary comfort. And my second wife has very flexible hours, so she does a whole part of the work that I don't do, because it must be recognized that I don't do much, I am very protected, and so from that point of view, it's also extraordinary comfort. I also had, and I think it must be the case for others in the room, a family model where my mother stopped working, and with regret, because I often talked to her about it, she would have liked to continue, but 40 or 50 years ago there was a single model: you stopped working to take care of your children, and I know she suffered from it.

And then I also had a professional model at Mazars, since I am a kind of dinosaur, I have known only one company, which I joined a little over 31 years ago. So I tell you right away: the Mazars of 31 years ago and the Mazars of today are completely different. I joined a Parisian firm, today it is an international company of 18,000 people present in 80 countries. I take this opportunity to do a little advertising, but I assure you, it's the only one I will do during this intervention. When I joined this firm, we worked a lot, and it was good form to come to work on Saturdays. Many came to work on Saturdays. Some even told me: 'It's not that we have a lot to do, but it's the tradition.' And the boss was there, Mr. Mazars, and the most senior partners were there, and ultimately it had become a kind of convention, and so we were raised in this work culture. So I assure you, it has changed a lot, but I believe that our firms, audit firms or consulting firms, have kept a bit of this work culture, and much of it is an element that no longer quite fits with the young generations we are welcoming. It is no longer a case of them waiting, it is something else, and work relationships have completely changed.

So you see, I really don't fit all the APIM boxes, and yet when I was told about this forum and when I was asked to speak, I immediately said yes. First, because I like new ideas; I think in the era we are in today, we must embrace all new ideas. And then, in thirty years, I will tell you honestly, it has bothered me several times to ask myself: 'But couldn't I work differently? Couldn't I take a little more time for myself, a little more leisure, or even a little more for my children?' For those who know me well, it is not because I have worked a lot that I have not had moments of doubt and moments when I wanted to do something else. I really like practicing sports; I gave it up, and it was a real sacrifice.

That the approach you have through APIM, it simply aims to put your desires on the table, and that is good. What we couldn't necessarily do, what I couldn't do 20 years ago, 30 years ago, has become a little more possible over the last ten years, but today it is good, it is good that it is expressed. The second point is that I think the models of the past must change. They are made, moreover, not to be reproduced; that is what we call progress. And what you are doing is good, because I find it very courageous to go see your employer, whoever it may be, or your project manager, your manager, or at the firm, and say to them: 'Mr. CEO, I love you enormously, but I don't only love you. I also love my children a lot, I also love my wife a lot, I also love cultural life a lot, I also love leisure a lot.' I find that courageous, and you must do it, because for many who did not do it, either they experienced frustration, or they left. And today, for companies like ours, the issue is not a commercial development issue, the market is good, it is a resource issue, it is a human issue, it is having the resources to work, and therefore having resources who want to stay with us and continue working.

I also believe that the approach you are taking is honest, because some of my generation ultimately organized it a bit on the sly: we organized ourselves without really saying it, we pretended to be there, we were not there. Today you have an approach that is honest, which consists of saying: 'I don't necessarily want to only work, I have other interests in life, I want a work-life balance.' And I think that is an honest approach. The third point is that I believe it will become really necessary, because what strikes me in thirty years of career, maybe I don't know, I find that the world of work has become harder and especially more complex. The multitude of sources of information, multiple connections, permanent connection, means that whether we like it or not, the brain is much more solicited than before. Today we work almost permanently. Take any young person, with their smartphone in hand; so when they enter a company, the smartphone is not only used to read private emails, there are also professional emails. So there is a world of work that has become harder. I often discuss with doctors and psychologists at La Défense, where unfortunately the headquarters of Mazars is, and they express to me a form of professional suffering that is increasing, then which is probably linked to the La Défense environment. I don't know if there are many companies present in the room from La Défense, but speaking with the medical community, there is real suffering at work that is linked to the complexity of this world of work, to the culture of objectives, and it is something that we must, I believe, be very vigilant about, especially since it no longer matches the aspirations of the young generations who are joining us. So that does not mean that these young generations are lazy, they don't want to work anymore, it's that they want to work differently. They want to have work time but also time when they do other things, and that is what we need to manage, that is what we need to discuss. And I think from that point of view, the initiatives of APIM are very interesting.

And then the last topic for me that is very important is the subject of gender equality and diversity. It is a subject that Mazars has been resolutely tackling for seven to eight years now. We have taken many measures in favor of women: we support maternity, maternity leave, return from maternity, which were difficult moments. Now, if you ask me if I am satisfied with the results – I hope there is no microphone or earphones in the room – the answer is clearly no. We hire 50% women among us, there are less than 20% women partners. So for me, it is not a moral question, a social question, it is a question of talent. That means we are losing enormous talent over the years and we are depriving ourselves of a part of the talents we have in the company. And the measures we have put in place have improved the situation but they have not answered everything. And interestingly, we organize once a year a meeting with young women of the firm, we have a dinner with about twenty young women of the firm aged 25 to 35, and during the dinner I asked one of them: 'But what can we do for you? How can we help you?' And she looks at me with a smile, she says: 'But for me you can do nothing. On the other hand, what could you do for my husband?' I was a bit surprised, thinking: 'But yes, in fact the problem is rather men.' That is, how can employers give men the possibility to have more flexibility, so that we don't have to bear all the family burdens that we have to bear today. And it is true that more and more – I was discussing this outside with our young people – wives want to have the same careers as men, and that's perfectly natural, and so they are as mobilized and sometimes much more than men themselves. And so we must be able to organize flexibility not only for women but also for men. And I really understood that day that probably the next step was to work on the male population. There are many other things to do on the male population, and notably to work on the unconscious biases that remain in gender equality. Whether we like it or not, I had difficulty accepting it but it exists, and this bias we will manage to resolve only by working on these subjects of flexibility of men's working time and gender equality.

So obviously, I not only appreciate what the APIM organization does, but I will also support it. I will support the young people who carry the APIMs – they don't all carry it by the way, we will have to implement it. I will start by meeting them more regularly. I will obviously listen to them, because I think they are bearers of the future for our firm. So, thank you to you and see you very soon.