Listen to staff. Evaluate an evaluation device.

Summary This article aims to solve the enigma of the deployment from 1990, and then the abandonment in 2012, of a system for evaluating the state of mind of employees in a French retail group. It is based on an ethnographic survey conducted within the group's human resources department and with one of the local facilitators of the system, as well as on interviews conducted with senior managers and employees. It deals with the diversity of uses of this system, called "personnel listening". It shows that an evaluation tool can be used simultaneously for various purposes by the same group of users. While some of these are widely publicized, including to audiences outside the organization, others are pursued more discreetly and only become apparent through direct observation of the various uses of the tool. The article also shows that the appropriation of the tool by different groups of users produces global effects that may not be intended by anyone, while being the result of the ends targeted by each. In so doing, we argue for a micro-sociological approach to evaluation devices centred on the description of their uses, proposing to mobilise the notion of evaluation reference.