Office notebook. People with disabilities, family carers or pregnant women: for these employees, the Bayer group introduced the concept of “therapeutic teleworking” in mid-October. Like many companies, after the Covid-19 episode, the pharmaceutical company pulled the pre-existing agreement out of the drawer and renegotiated it by broadening the range of recourse to telework: ordinary, specific, occasional, imposed, but also … “Therapeutic”, “Decided for health reasons, generally temporary and medically justified”. It is the health service that offers teleworking organizational methods to which managers and HR are best suited, specifies Bayer.
Until the health crisis, “For people with disabilities, as for other employees, teleworking was not a customary practice, observes Véronique Bustreel, director of innovation and strategy at the Association for the management of the fund for the professional integration of disabled people. It is the therapeutic part-time that was used ”. But since the Covid-19, it is an alternative.
The Agence nouvelle des solidarités actives (ANSA), which regularly questions people with disabilities, confirms this in a survey to be published on December 15. Teleworking now represents an opportunity for their jobs and working conditions, “Because it reduces commuting time and fatigue, because it meets the need to reconcile working time with care, because it allows you to work in a quieter environment and facilitates the organization of time working independently ”, explain the employees solicited. Even if they warn against the risk of isolation and the lack of equipment.
Amendments and charter
The Covid-19 has highlighted the possible articulation of remote work with health constraints, “prescription teleworking” has therefore served as a crutch for disabled employment. In the ANSA survey, a third of disabled employees believe that teleworking can contribute to job retention.
The figures of Observatory for Employment and Disability confirm this for 2021: the number of disabled employees retained has jumped by 21% over one year (+ 33% in the public sector and + 20% in the private sector). “It is first and foremost a catching-up effect compared to the low in 2020, relativizes Véronique Bustreel. Compared to 2019, the increase is more moderate (+ 10.47%). But there is a real effect of visibility. During the Covid, disabled employees had to make themselves known to obtain the necessary accommodations as vulnerable people. “
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