How can companies be helped to incorporate the issue of health and prevention better into age management policy?

Recent legislative changes are tending to lengthen working lives, constraining companies to reconsider age management, in particular by incorporating the health/safety aspects into it, and, further upstream, by incorporating prevention into it. The study proposes to help them, by studying the link-up between enacting of the law and appropriation of it by the organisational stakeholders. We focus on the Human Resources Manager (HRM), a key stakeholder in the process, and on the age management tools. The operational objectives focus firstly on developing an approach enabling the HRM to mobilise all of the stakeholders, within the company and outside the company, who are concerned by age management; secondly, they focus on proposing recommendations (on the existing HR tools and methods) for those stakeholders, making it possible to incorporate health and prevention in age management policies.

The work will be based on prior documentary analysis of societal changes in age management. Studying the link-up between law and organisation at company level, it will include three sections: a survey on the place of the HRM in the process, an analysis of the management tools used in age management, and interventional research in two companies concerned by setting up an age management system.

By reaching out to an HR audience, we will contribute to producing knowledge on the way in which the institution can help these stakeholders to mobilise an internal network for re-incorporating the health aspects into age management, by proposing an approach involving, among others, the occupational physician, around tools that are revised or indeed supplemented. We also aim to show the relevance and viability of local innovations, and future “good practices”, that we will then contribute to disseminating.

Thus, it is planned to have at least three publications accepted in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and an article in an HR professional journal.