The fear of speaking of bad health in Britain is to chase people of workforce at an increasing cost for society and business, according to the former boss of John Lewis.
Charlie Mayfield, who was charged by the British government With ways to find ways to remain sick and disabled at work, people have often found themselves on unemployment and benefits due to a lack of health support on the workplace.
“There is a lot of fear. The people who are afraid of disclosing their state … and also the fear on the side of the line manager, to say the bad thing,” he said.
Mayfield said HR managers It had often been said not to call someone who was sick, in case they were accused of intimidation and who found themselves in a court. “They would do everything to avoid this.”
The result, he said, has been that people who could better stay at work, including many with slight anxiety or depression, are left to be transmitted to the house while managers “flow to the stopwatch” until they can terminate the contract.
Mayfield's challenge, when he establishes political recommendations for ministers in the fall, will be to determine what should fill the current vacuum in the British system – and how to pay for this.
The challenges are high, he told Financial Times in an interview, when a “growing wave” of illness and disability is “to land on a system that has never been particularly well suited or designed” to cope with it.
Among employers, “there is an understanding that everyone loses if we do not solve this problem,” said Mayfield, president of the John Lewis partnership from 2007 to 2020. The retailer belongs to his employees.
Mayfield, who was appointed to direct the exam last November, spoke under pressure from ministers to abandon the cuts provided for illness and disability benefits that allowed the government of 4.8 billion pounds sterling per year, but pushed hundreds of thousands of people in poverty.
The ministers argued that the reform of well-being is a “moral mission” to help people work rather than spending a life in services, but thoughts believe that between 50,000 and 100,000 people will find jobs following reforms.
“Prevention is preferable that healing,” said Mayfield, who maintains that it is in the interest of companies to have more support in place to prevent people from falling from employment when they develop a state of health for the first time.
Currently, said Mayfield, the British system “begins with employment law
Pressures on family physicians mean that most of them have the time or expertise to assess people's ability to work when they require a so-called “adjustment note” to justify prolonged leave.
These notes are supposed to help people stay at work, defining all the necessary adjustments to do so. But in practice, doctors sign more than 9 out of 10 patients as unfit to work.
Many are then found on prolonged disease leave until their eligibility for statutory disease wages is exhausted. Unless employers offer additional support for occupational health or disease salaries – which small businesses often feel unable to do – people often slip to claim health -related advantages.
Mayfield underlines the Netherlands as an example of the opposite extreme. There, employers must offer occupational health support and continue to pay wages up to two years when an employee falls ill, provided that the employees have aid to return to work.
“There is a stronger safety net with higher expectations,” said Mayfield, describing a structured process where business doctors lay the interests of patients with those of the company and the company as a whole.
He did not recommend going to the Netherlands, where a consequence of tasks on employers is a high work rate on concerts.
But even if the ministers have sought to reduce expenses in health benefits, he argued, they should find ways to channel more money in occupational health, whether taxpayers, employers or individuals.
“Some other countries spend more than us as part of GDP, but they spend more in areas where they get a return, on prevention and rehabilitation,” he said. “When you think about it economically … it's a very different image.”
