French term (edited): Participation/Int�ressement

I hope this helps!

French term (edited): Participation/Int�ressement

As will be seen below, the picture is rather ambiguous, and the target term given above is a safe, cover-all option.

participation = employee profit sharing
intéressement: can be a share-ownership scheme among others
however, several of my lexicographic sources give "intéressement" as "profit sharing";
Another gives "Intéressement des salariés" as "Employee incentive scheme"
A third, "Prime d'intéressement" as "Share of the profits"

Both participation and intéressement are frequently described as coming under the general term of profit-sharing, and rightly so - they are both designed to share the profits arising from the performance of the business with employees.

However, several sources do also seem to keep "profit-sharing" for participation and use "incentive" for intéressement. This reflects the fact that the former is a very transparently calculated proportion of company profits, whereas the latter, while inevitably linked in some way to the profitability of the business, is calculated according to an agreed formula and based on agreed metrics, and may be zero if profits are weak enough, depending on the terms of the agreement.

However, I would say that the intéressement, howsoever indirect its relationship to net profit, remains a type of profit-share, since the performance indicators that it uses are pretty much always going to correlate to profits.

The potential problems with "incentive", as I see it, are that:
(i) it, like profit-sharing, is quite a broad term. By applying "profit-sharing" to one and "incentive" to the other, we risk confusion, since both may, in the normal sense of the words, be considered to be a form of "profit-sharing" and both may equally be considered to be types of "incentive" scheme. The spirit of intéressement is to share profitability with employees, and participation is also a matter of incentive, since it is within the power of the staff as a whole to affect the outcome by working harder. So for me this does little to differentiate the two in a meaningful way without inviting confusion.
(ii) Whereas both participation and intéressement are collective in nature, and do not award individual rewards based on individual performance, "incentive" schemes are frequently based on individual or team performance. Indeed, by default, one expects incentive plans to differentiate between employees that are just doing the bare minimum, employees that are meeting expectations and employees that are exceeding expectations, and the very concept of "incentive" is diminished where it is possible for some employees to profit indiscriminately from the hard work of their colleagues, since on an individual basis employees may not be "incentivized" to go the extra mile if they can be carried along by the efforts of their peers. Intéressement explicitly deviates from these expectations of "incentives" - perhaps reflecting a difference between the collectivist, unionized mindset of the French workplace and its national context on the one hand, and the individualist, competitive psychology more typical of the Anglo-Saxon system. In short, I think "incentive" may strike the wrong note.

Where a SL legal term cannot be easily summed up by a single TL word, since any one word may be too general, vague or even misleading, it might be worth resorting to a multi-word solution, however clunky this may end up seeming when repeated ad nauseum in a legal text (when is a contract not clunky, and does it matter, provided it is clear?)

I have seen a number of sources using either "compulsory profit-sharing" or "mandatory profit-sharing" for part. and "voluntary profit-sharing" or "optional profit-sharing" for inté.. For reasons I am unable to articulate I prefer mandatory over compulsory and optional over voluntary. Either way I think this way of translating the two terms works best and does the best job of avoiding confusion.

The one difficulty I see with this solution (and for me, it's not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it might require some creative thinking) is this: while the main and most defining difference between participation and intéressement is indeed that one is mandatory and the other is optional, participation is only mandatory for firms of a given size (>50 employees?). Businesses under that size may opt to enter into a voluntary participation agreement (which feels oxymoronic against the above distinctions) with their few dozen employees. Such an agreement would be exactly the same as any other participation arrangement but for the fact that the employer was not obliged to do it. So, using the same terminology, we would be faced with an "optional mandatory profit-sharing scheme" or something along those lines. I would be interested to see how those sources whom I have seen using my favoured solutions cope with that (admittedly minority) case.