What is the background to this agreement?
We had a historical retirement preparation agreement dating back to 1976, which was quite innovative as it allowed employees to move to part-time work three or four years before their retirement. When renegotiating this agreement, I felt it was an opportunity to look more broadly at employees’ needs and expectations, and at how to better accommodate different life stages. We therefore organised collaborative workshops across all our sites to get employees thinking about long-term and short-term time in the business, and about the need to preserve the group’s tradition and culture while adding a touch of modernity. Based on these reflections, we organised a working retreat with the executive committee and the Boiron family, who are deeply involved in our social policy. It was on this occasion that the idea of a “key life moments account” (CMCV) emerged. The goal was to create an intergenerational mechanism capable of supporting employees through various situations they may face over the course of their lives.
We then called on a broker to simulate the costs. We were moving from a retirement preparation scheme covering around 160 employees at a cost of roughly three million euros per year to an account potentially affecting up to 1,400 of our 1,700 employees in France.