Work preferences of Occupational Health Advisors in the UK

Since Covid Occupational Health Advisors have seen a huge change in how they work. Historically Occupational Health Advisors have been required to go on site, often travelling hundreds of miles a week to get to client sites and deliver their service. Covid meant this wasn’t possible for many, and as a result we saw a huge rise in home working. Will we ever go back? Well, our latest survey on Linkedin suggests not. RH Occupational Health ran a poll on Linkedin recently and asked its 1000 followers, what is your favourite way of working?

The results were:

Fully remote, home based: 39%

Hybrid with some on site work: 45%

Fully peripatetic: 0%

In house on site every day: 15%

As you can see from the results the preference for at least some home working applies to 84% of respondents, with no one saying that a fully peripatetic role would be their preference. Occupational Health providers are responding to this with the market leaders employing hundreds of fully remote Occupational Health Advisors. However, the survey shows that the highest response was for a mixture of onsite and home working. From conversations I have with OH Advisors every day I would say this is the preference. Many fully remote OHA’s tell me that they miss the office environment, the face-to-face contact with employees, and the variety of responsibilities that come with site-based work. OHA’s are seeking ever more flexible working arrangements and given the hundreds of unfilled roles in the market, who is going to stop them? Employers realise this and are offering ever increasing flexibility to their OHA’s, but balancing this with contract delivery is certainly a challenge. What this survey does show is that if you are looking for a full peripatetic OHA at the moment, then maybe you need to rethink the role and offer some element home working.

RH Occupational Health recruits temporary, contract, and permanent Occupational Health professionals throughout the UK.