OECD Ageing Workshop: Business Underlines Value of Complementary Public and Workforce Frameworks

Our Health Committee Vice-Chair and BDA's Susanne Wagenmann participated in the OECD-Global Coalition on Aging workshop on "Building Healthy, Productive Workforces for our 21^st Century", where she intervened in a session on collaborative solutions for health ageing and economic growth. She underlined that employers see healthy ageing and sustainable growth as a shared responsibility. To succeed, governments must create enabling frameworks, companies provide practical workplace measures, and workers’ representatives can help to build trust. What matters is cooperation instead of parallel structures – each actor should bring its specific strengths, while respecting the voluntary and flexible role of companies. She also emphasised that the most effective solutions arise where public frameworks and workplace practice complement each other. Employers are ready to invest in prevention and healthy ageing, but need enabling conditions instead of rigid obligations. The value is clear: healthier, motivated employees mean higher productivity, lower absence, and stronger retention.

Our Health Committee Vice-Chair and Sanofi's David Elvira Martinez also joined discussions, and we look forward to working with the OECD on this workstream. He also outlined the need for data from the OECD on the evidence of return on investment for prevention, as well as the need for private sector stakeholders to drive discussions with governments to push for investment in prevention.