Vaccination and workplace: the role of trust in our wellness policy

Andrew Ward - Chief Scientific Officer           March 30, 2021

These are questions that concern us as we look to the end of the pandemic and a return (hopefully!) to some semblance of normal. The issues are complex, and there are no easy answers, but I think that there are some principles that can guide us and help us fulfil our obligations both to our staff and to wider society.

As a medical communications agency, indeed as an industry, we have a responsibility to communicate good science clearly and objectively. And the science behind vaccination, in general and specifically in relation to COVID, is indeed good.

We should therefore be supportive of the roll-out of the COVID vaccinations, and would hope that our teams would be queueing up to be vaccinated. There are, however, valid reasons why some people may be unable to be vaccinated, or choose not to be vaccinated, and these reasons do not negate the overall importance of vaccination.

While we were all stuck working from home this was of course largely immaterial. But as we consider a return to the office it is becoming more pressing to develop a company position on vaccination.

What are the issues? Well:

The first is clearly that vaccination must be an individual decision

The second is that you cannot legally ask people whether or not they have been vaccinated – or whether for whatever reason they can’t be vaccinated

The third is timing – should we open the office as early as possible, with appropriate social distancing measures in place? Or do we wait until all the relevant age cohorts have had the opportunity to receive their first vaccination at least, and open up more fully?

The safest position would be to await guidance from the government – at least then we would better understand our liability as an employer.

But we don’t know when this will be forthcoming, and in the meantime, we’re constantly being asked by our staff what our plans are.

Perhaps it is too early to start making plans, but it’s not too early to establish some principles. And we already have these, embodied in our new ‘Working and Wellness’ policy.

This policy is based on mutual trust: we as a company are flexible (primarily in relation to where, when and how our people work, but also with respect to issues of personal choice that affect the workplace – such as vaccination); and in return our people need to be considerate (of colleagues, of project deadlines). Being considerate obviously extends to not putting colleagues at risk and aligns with our culture statement that: “first and foremost, we are a team – we work together, we respect and support each other, we embrace our differences”.

We are going to be guided by the government in relation to when we reopen the office and providing a safe working environment. In relation to vaccination, I think we can trust our team not to do anything to put their colleagues and friends at risk. We’ve trusted our people this far and they haven’t let us down, so I think we can afford to trust them too when it comes to a return to work.

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