What is occupational health and safety?

Health and safety at work are part of a European framework directive applied in France since 1993 and whose general principles are defined in the Labour Code. ¹ The employer must put in place all the necessary practical measures to ensure the physical and mental safety of employees.

Initially, health and safety at work covered only physical safety relating to preventing the accidents at work and occupational diseases. Today, it also includes the protection of all the risks to which an employee could be exposed as a result of her/his missions, and in particular the protection of psychosocial risks.

Who is responsible for safety at work?

It is the employer who is responsible: she/he must achieve a result.

The employer has the obligation and duty to organize health and safety at work. It is therefore required to identify, assess and classify risks in order to implement all prevention measures. This classification and these measures are recorded through the Single Document for the Assessment of Occupational Risks. This document must be updated at least once a year. ¹

The employer must also involve employees and employee representative bodies (staff delegates) in particular for the organization of relief through first-aid workers at work. He is also assisted, among others, by occupational medicine and occupational risk prevention workers.

How to manage safety at work?

The french National Institute of Research and Safety for the Prevention of Occupational Accidents and Diseases (INRS) offers an occupational health and safety management system through 8 good practices. ²

1. Integrate occupational health and safety management into all functions of the company.
2. Harmonize health and safety policy with other company policies.
3. Develop the autonomy of the company in terms of prevention. This may lead to specialized occupational health and safety staff and specially trained staff for certain activities.
4. Promote a multidisciplinary approach.
5. Make the identification and assessment of risks, a priori, a major element of occupational health and safety policy.
6. Integrate prevention into the design of premises, equipment, workstations and working methods. Occupational health and safety will be taken into account when designing or furnishing work premises. In particular, it will be integrated into working methods and processes.
7. Analyse accidents at work and occupational diseases by going back to the most upstream causes. We only control what we measure. The introduction of tools measuring the factors influencing health and safety at work, on the one hand and, measuring the results obtained in terms of accidents, occupational diseases and working conditions, on the other hand, is the very basis of a good risk management. The field covered may also include the study of employees' perception or interventions carried out by an ergonomist.
8. Improve the risk management policy and evolve the company’s core values.

Workplace safety and teleworking

With the pandemic, teleworking has become massively established by obligation. But it also corresponds more and more to a demand from employees aspiring to more flexibility in the choice of workplace in order to better balance private and professional life.

As in the INRS tells us: “In terms of the prevention of occupational risks, the employer has the same obligations towards all employees, whether or not they are teleworking.” ³

There is therefore a double challenge for the company:

• maintain the effectiveness of the system in place to ensure the health and safety of workers on site;
• extend the system to cover employees in teleworking positions.

On site, the chain of rescuers is impacted by teleworking: rescuers can also be teleworking and it is therefore necessary for the company to ensure real efficiency.

For teleworkers, it is a question of ensuring that the workspace, whether at home or in a third place such as a coworking space, meets the criteria of occupational safety and health. This will concern elements such as lighting, electrical and fire safety, hygiene and ventilation, compliance with social distancing instructions, etc. If it is difficult to guarantee an adequate workspace at home, the focus should be on raising awareness and training employees. In a coworking space, the company can, on the other hand, ensure the adequacy of the services offered by the operator. It is therefore interesting for an operator to implement health and safety elements. In a corporate coworking room setting, the presence and organization of a chain of first-aid workers is more complicated to set up than in the strict framework of the company. Then, it consists of organizing a backup chain between the operator of a coworking space and the various companies using the service.

Digitalization serving the Safe Office

In practise, a smart office solution will simplify and accelerate the sharing of information within the company between employees and health and safety stakeholders. This shared information will allow a quick risks identification in order to trigger corrective actions more effectively. This is the principle of smart offices that contribute to the safety of users.

There are three application cases where the use of a space management application will simplify and make the company’s actions more efficient.

A more efficient chain of rescuers

The use of massive teleworking is impacting the chain of rescuers. It is necessary to ensure the presence of rescuers in sufficient number compared to a fluctuating number of employees each day of the week and on each site. It therefore becomes necessary to measure the presence of first-aid workers and collaborators in time and space, in order to be able to identify new weaknesses in the system that can then be addressed in a process of continuous improvement in connection with the rescuers and the health and safety committee. The interest of a digital presence management and detection tool is to be able to systematize and precisely manage the organization of rescuers through factual data. This makes it easier and more effective to bring occupational health and safety needs in line with the changing needs of companies and new ways of working.

A first-aid presence detection application available to all employees will also contribute to a faster incidents management. The application allows the employee to notify the incident, identify and warn the nearest rescuers in order to simplify and make more efficient the implementation of the rescue chain.

The use of a centralized intelligent management application by company managers, employee representative bodies and employees is therefore part of risk management at the level of work processes and meets the best practices indicated by INRS.

Pilot and check social distancing rules

Having occupancy metrics linked to the cartographic knowledge of spaces will allow to measure the average surface area per user and identify the points of excessive concentration of people in order to establish health safety gauges adapted to each space. It also becomes possible to control the allocation of places on the basis of maximum capacity criteria through an office reservation system. The measurement of the occupancy of offices and meeting rooms will then make it easy to check that the pre-defined limits are respected.

Centralized management of equipment and incidents

The use of a space management solution will make it possible to localize safety equipment (fire extinguishers, defibrillators), share information across all the company’s functions and simplify the identification of incidents and the triggering of corrective interventions.

Employees can report incidents directly through the application. These incident reports geo-referenced inside the buildings can then be analyzed and processed by the various competent services through a single tool. Conversely, in case of need, employees have access to the position of the safety equipment around them.

The digitalization of these processes contributes to improve the effectiveness of risk identification, risk assessment and prevention.

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1. Occupational Health and Safety ↩︎

2. Occupational Risk Control Policy, Core Values and Good Prevention Practices ↩︎

3. Telework and occupational health, consequences for all employees ↩︎