For 2020 and 2021, the impact of Covid is estimated at 0.3 day per employee and per year. For 2022, the impact of Covid was higher (estimated at 1 day per employee and per year). After deducting this impact, the level of absence due to sickness and accidents is in line with the findings for 2018 and 2019. Prevention of anxiety- and depression-related disorders, stress and muscular-skeletal disorders (MSD), the three main causes of absenteeism, are regularly targeted by prevention initiatives.
The development of team empowerment projects also led to a significant drop in absenteeism among the employees of the teams involved, due to the positive health impacts of the improved quality of life in the groups and the increased levels of commitment and meaningfulness of work.
| 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Number of days of absence per employee and per year (EDF group) | Number of days of absence per employee and per year (EDF group) 2020 8.8 |
Number of days of absence per employee and per year (EDF group) 2021 9.1 |
Number of days of absence per employee and per year (EDF group) 2022 9.8 |
The EDF group employs personnel who specialise in occupational health, as well as doctors who are experts in environmental health and public health. In addition to medical monitoring of employees, these healthcare workers are involved in setting up prevention programmes and are stakeholders on all the social dialogue bodies in the field of health at work.
The EDF group is also committed to public health issues such as addiction and cardiovascular risk prevention.
Work time
For companies based in France, the duration of the working week is 35 hours, with shifts spanning for a minimum of 5 days. In order to meet the needs relating to each company’s business and particularly to ensure continuous operation, the Group’s employees may be required to provide a continuous service or be on call outside of regular working hours. These arrangements are according to the changing circumstances at each company, legislation and new authorised work organisation practices.
By implementing “forfaits jours” agreements (which provide managers a fixed number of working days and have proved overwhelmingly popular among them) in most of the Group’s companies, the Group has sought to modernise how working hours are structured in order to promote agility and employee empowerment.
Improvement of management methods and work organisation continued in 2022, particularly focusing on improvements to practices initiated during the Covid crisis, and the deployment of company-wide agreements laid down in 2021 in certain Group companies (EDF, the network manager Enedis, among others). These developments are aimed at striking a new balance between seeking performance gains, strengthening cohesion among the groups and enhancing the well-being of each employee. The coordination of this managerial and organisational transformation is now organised at the level of the EDF group in France, with the setting up of a network of local officers in the main Group companies in France. This France Group initiative was launched in October 2022 under the banner “Working Differently, Managing Differently”.
For EDF, a Travailler autrement, manager autrement (“Work Differently, Manage Differently”) agreement was signed on 15 November 2021. This global agreement includes a process of team empowerment, new working methods (updating the consistent framework for working-from-home with a maximum of 10 days/month of permitted working-from-home, new options for flexible working hours where necessary adjusting working hours to approximate as closely as possible to employees’ needs, provided the level of work teams’ performance is maintained, working directly on-site) and will be implemented through the co-construction of a team project to determine how the teams’ operations will change. In order to support staff during these changes, the Group has also instituted 2 financial-assistance schemes in connection with working-from-home: an indemnity of up to €20 per month. This is the employer’s contribution to home occupancy expenses (rent, taxes, variable costs), and assistance for equipment to telework in satisfactory conditions.
For EDF and Enedis, the deployment of the “Work Differently, Manage Differently” agreement and the “Work Differently and Together to Transform our Management Methods” agreement allowed development of new working methods within the teams (updating the consistency framework for working-from-home, new scope for flexible working hours, working directly on site). Furthermore, the development of trust and empowerment is continuing, through the aforementioned agreements and through approaches set in motion in other companies (e.g. Framatome).
In the context of the Covid crisis and its consequences, several Group companies have seen themselves compelled to institute or review their working-from-home agreements (Enedis, EDF Renewables, Électricité de Strasbourg, Framatome, among others).
This trend is becoming more pronounced with the computerisation of certain tasks, and the ever-massive recourse to remote-collaborative tools (electronic signatures, Teams, etc.)
The Group’s employee benefits policy is based on three main principles: a principle of responsibility, a principle of balance between competitiveness and sustainability, and a principle of appropriation by beneficiaries. Providing sustainable employee benefits that are adapted to local market conditions requires them to be financially sustainable in the long term, for both employees and employers.
In France, the majority of the Group’s workforce are employed by companies descended from “historic operators” (EDF, Enedis (1), PEI) which have electricity and gas industry or “EGI” status. This status carries an entitlement to special social security schemes, including special sickness, disability and pension schemes. If employees with EGI status are unfit for work (sickness/maternity/disability), they thus benefit from a customised level of cover. In terms of healthcare costs, in addition to the basic scheme, their special scheme includes an additional mandatory part, which also covers retired employees. Employees with EGI status and EGI pensioners have access to centralised social activities, financed by the companies in the professional branch and managed independently by the unions. In addition to these schemes, there is a benefit in kind historically based on a company decision which covers gas and electricity supplied by historic operators to employees and which is maintained for retired employees.
(1) A distribution operator managed in accordance with the rules of managerial independence.
