Office notebook. It is not very surprising that in 2021, the World Day for Safety and Health at Work will be held on Wednesday April 28 on the theme of anticipation and resilient occupational safety and health systems, because the environment in which the employee protection system was designed has been changed. The health risk in business has been amplified by the health crisis and the border between private and professional life is blurring.
At the end of a year of debate, the national inter-professional agreement of December 9, 2020 on occupational health incorporated the new paradigm: “It is shifting our occupational medicine from a logic historically centered on individual medical monitoring and compensation to an approach based on prevention at the heart of the issues of health and safety at work for employees”, declared Laurent Pietraszewski, Secretary of State in charge of pensions and occupational health, on December 10, 2020.
The Covid-19 served as a trigger for better consideration of the health of employees by the employer. Nearly eight in ten executives (78%) now consider that the health of their employees and the performance of their company are closely linked, reveals the study Health of leaders published on April 28 by the mutualist Malakoff Humanis.
A shaken role
The health crisis has redefined the place of health in business and has shaken up the role of the manager. On April 20, around twenty trades (housekeepers, cashiers in grocery stores, employees of meat processing companies, etc.) involving some 400,000 second-line workers, became a priority to be vaccinated at from April 24.
Was it a personal question or a new file entrusted to local managers? If an employer cannot require that his employees be vaccinated, the manager is obliged to take into account the vaccination campaign to coordinate his team. The concern of some, the call for civility of others and the management of absences for vaccination are his responsibility.
The role of the manager has become more complex with the crisis. On the sole subject of Covid, for more than a year, “The instructions of the health authorities are evolving”, as Laurent Pietraszewski likes to recall. The occupational health services are regularly invited to stay on deck, and in the company, the manager must apply, and enforce, instructions that he has not necessarily yet received, and meet the expectations of employees who very often precede public decisions.
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