News : Mental health has become the leading cause of long-term sick leave in France. In its Absenteeism study released on 9 June 2026, Malakoff Humanis reports that psychological disorders were, in 2025, the stated reason for 37.8% of sick leaves longer than thirty days, against 30.3% in 2020. Managers are clearly over-represented: 44.4%, against 32.5% for non-managers. Those absences do not appear out of nowhere. They almost always have a history inside the way work is organised, and that history is exactly what the French concept of risques psychosociaux, psychosocial risks, is meant to describe (Malakoff Humanis, Absenteeism study 2026, 9 June 2026).
This article is written for HR managers, company directors and line managers who have been hearing about psychosocial risks for years without ever being told where to start. I set out the definition, the reading grid that actually works on the ground, what French law requires, and the assessment and action-plan method I run when a company brings me in. I am an HR professional, not a clinician.
Psychosocial risks: the short definition
Psychosocial risks are risks to employees’ mental and physical health that originate in the organisation of work, in professional relationships and in employment conditions. They describe a work situation, never the fragility of an individual, and in France they are assessed through six recognised families of factors.
What psychosocial risks actually cover
The word psychosocial makes directors uncomfortable because it sounds like a diagnosis. It is not one. It says that the risk arises where the psychological meets the social, and that what gets assessed is the second term: the organisation of work and working relationships. The category covers chronic stress born of a lasting imbalance between what a job demands and the means available to do it, occupational burnout, and internal as well as external violence. Those are the three components the INRS, the French national institute for occupational health and safety research, uses to describe psychosocial risks (in French). Workplace harassment has its own statutory definition, in article L. 1152-1 of the French Labour Code (in French).
Three confusions come up in every single assignment. Treating psychosocial risks as a wellbeing programme: a table football table does not change a workload. Confusing the risk with the person, as in “that is just how he is”. And believing that an employee who does not complain is fine. In the same 9 June 2026 study, Malakoff Humanis reports that half the employees concerned do not dare raise the subject at work. None of this is about atmosphere. It is about working conditions that wear people down. When I walk into a mid-sized company, what I hear first is almost never the acronym: it is schedules that never hold, decisions that never come back down the line, and people quietly absorbing the difference.
The six families reading grid
France has a shared reference framework that prevention specialists use: the six families of psychosocial risk factors (in French) set out in the expert panel report submitted to the Ministry of Labour. I use them as an interview checklist. It is also the comment I hear most often when I run a training session: managers arrive expecting a conversation about personalities and leave with questions about workload, room for manoeuvre and ground rules.
| Family of factors | What it looks like in practice | The question I ask in interview |
|---|---|---|
| Work intensity and working time | Deadlines met at the cost of unrecorded hours; constant interruptions. | “In the past fortnight, when were you unable to do your job properly?” |
| Emotional demands | Daily contact with angry customers or distressed families, with no recovery time. | “Which situations stay with you after you get home?” |
| Autonomy and room for manoeuvre | Procedures that dictate the how; no control over one’s own pace. | “What do you decide alone, and what needs sign-off?” |
| Social relationships at work | An unreachable manager, arbitrations never delivered, recognition that only ever arrives as criticism. | “When you have a problem, who do you go to, and what happens next?” |
| Value conflicts | Cutting corners on quality to hold the pace; selling something you know the customer does not need. | “Do you sometimes have to do things you disagree with? Which ones?” |
| Job insecurity | A reorganisation announced then suspended; a core tool replaced without training. | “What will be different about your job six months from now?” |
No family means anything on its own. A heavy workload in an autonomous, stable job has nothing in common with the same workload in a tightly constrained one. It is the accumulation that does the damage. And the questions have to stay concrete: “are you stressed?” produces a polite yes, while “talk me through last Tuesday” produces material you can work with.
What the law requires of the employer
The legal base is a handful of Labour Code articles, and I quote them verbatim in meetings because they end the debate.
- Article L. 4121-1 (in French): the employer must take the measures necessary to ensure the safety and protect the physical and mental health of workers. Mental health is named explicitly, and that is what grounds the employer’s duty of care on this ground.
- Article L. 4121-2 (in French): the nine general prevention principles, including avoiding risks, assessing those that cannot be avoided, combating risk at source, adapting work to the individual, and planning prevention so that it takes in the organisation of work.
- Article R. 4121-1: the employer must record and keep up to date the results of the risk assessment in a single document, the document unique d’evaluation des risques professionnels, usually shortened to DUERP. It has no optional annex.
- Article L. 1152-1: the statutory definition of workplace harassment.
- Articles L. 4624-1 and following: individual health monitoring, the role of the occupational physician, the return-to-work medical visit and workstation adjustments.
What I write here is a general marker. On a specific case, whether that is a harassment report, litigation or a fitness-for-work decision, have it validated by an employment lawyer, by the labour inspectorate or by your occupational health service. I am an HR professional, not a lawyer.
The framework is moving. The French occupational health plan for 2026-2030, presented on 5 June 2026 to the national council on working conditions, lists among its five priorities the promotion of mental health, a designated national cause for 2025-2026, and the prevention of psychosocial risks. The European Parliament is separately examining an own-initiative procedure titled “Psychosocial risks, stress and mental health at work”, with an indicative plenary date of 5 October 2026. Nothing has been adopted: it is a request addressed to the Commission, not a directive.
Assessing: my method in a mid-sized company
I never arrive with a sixty-item questionnaire. This is the sequence I apply, and it takes six to ten weeks in a company of fifty to three hundred people.
- Frame it with the leadership team first. What scope, who sees the results, and what the company commits to afterwards. Without an answer to the third question, the exercise does more damage than doing nothing at all.
- Bring in the employee representative body from the framing stage, not at the presentation of findings. In France that body is the CSE, the elected staff committee. Its members know where the hot spots are, and their presence changes what employees are willing to say.
- Collect what already exists. Repeated short absences, turnover by department, exit interviews, works council minutes, alerts from the occupational physician. That data is almost always sitting there, and almost never read together.
- Listen unit by unit. One-hour individual interviews, then groups of six to eight people from the same occupation, working through the six families. I am after full coverage of situations, not of individuals.
- Report back by work unit, never by individual. No quote that can be traced to a person. I say so at the start of every interview.
- Write the conclusions into the DUERP, not into a separate report. A risk that has been assessed but does not enter the single document has not, administratively speaking, been assessed.
Where my role stops. I am an HR professional and a trainer. I am neither a doctor nor a psychologist. I work on the organisation of work, never on anyone’s psyche, and I make no diagnosis. As soon as an individual situation is worrying, the handover is to the occupational physician, the person’s own doctor or a psychologist. In an emergency in France, call 15; and 3114 is the national suicide prevention line, free and open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
From diagnosis to prevention plan
A diagnosis without an action plan is a document of reproach. Prevention is built on three levels, in this order.
- Primary prevention, acting on the organisation. The only level that removes the risk at source: revisiting a workload, making clear who arbitrates, writing down the rules on evening availability. The most demanding politically, which is why it is the one most often sidestepped.
- Secondary prevention, equipping people. Training managers to spot difficulty and signpost help, opening spaces to discuss the work as it is really done. Useful, unless it becomes an alibi for skipping the level above.
- Tertiary prevention, supporting those already affected. Preparing the return after long-term leave, adjusting the workstation with the occupational physician. By this point you are repairing.
Three disciplines on the plan itself: five actions maximum, at least two of them primary; a named owner and a date for each; a review at six months with the employee representatives.
Two formats often complete that secondary level, and I run both. Training volunteer employees in mental health first aid, so they learn to recognise signs of distress and signpost help. A first aider signposts, a first aider does not treat. Or opening the subject collectively through a workshop to talk about mental health at work, where nobody has to talk about themselves. Neither removes the need to act on the organisation.
The mistakes I see most often
- Reporting findings for a three-person department. Anonymity becomes fiction and trust is gone.
- Handing the file to front-line managers alone. They are exposed themselves: in its 9 June 2026 study, Malakoff Humanis reports that 53% of managers were signed off sick at least once during 2025.
- Planning nothing for the return after long-term leave. That is the moment when everything is decided again, and it is the standard blind spot of prevention plans.
Where to start
When a director tells me everything is fine, the first thing I look at is not the declared climate. It is what happens when someone comes back from long-term leave, and who picked up their work while they were away. Three moves are enough to begin, with no budget. Open your DUERP and read what it actually says on this ground. Pull twelve months of absences by department, draw no conclusion, and simply look at where they concentrate. Then spend an hour on the six families table with two or three managers. If chronic stress is what comes back first, that is where the workload conversation starts.
What this article does not cover
- Individual situations, which are for the occupational physician, the treating doctor or a psychologist, not for an HR reading grid.
- Handling a harassment report, a regulated procedure to be run with specialist legal advice.
- Sector-specific rules, for night work, the public sector or health and social care, which come on top of this base.
- Costings. No cost of ill health, no return on investment for prevention: without a solid source, I do not put a number on it.
- The detail of the training and awareness formats, which I cover on the blog.
FAQ
What is the difference between stress and psychosocial risks?
Stress is a reaction, individual and variable. Psychosocial risks are the features of the work situation likely to produce it over time: workload, emotional demands, lack of autonomy, degraded working relationships, value conflicts, insecurity. You act on the second and you observe the first. An action plan therefore addresses the organisation, not the assumed resilience of individuals.
Do psychosocial risks really have to appear in the DUERP?
Article R. 4121-1 of the Labour Code requires the employer to record and update the results of the risk assessment in a single document, and it excludes nothing. In practice it is often the thinnest line in the whole file. On the drafting itself, have it checked by your occupational health service.
Do I have to bring in an external provider?
No. A mid-sized company can run a serious assessment itself if it involves the employee representatives, holds the line on confidentiality and commits to what follows. What an external brings is speech that opens up in front of someone outside the reporting line, and a method that owes nothing to internal power dynamics. That matters most when the subject is already contentious.
Is an anonymous survey enough?
It is not. A survey gives you a snapshot and some warning lights, but it tells you neither why nor since when. Without interviews behind it, what it mostly produces is frustration: employees answered, and now they are waiting. It is a starting point, never a deliverable.
What do I do when an employee is visibly struggling?
You do not have to qualify what they are going through, and you certainly should not put a name on it. Say what you observe without interpreting it, ask how they are, listen without advising, and remind them of the routes to help: the occupational physician, their own doctor, a psychologist, 3114 in case of distress and 15 in a life-threatening emergency.
Is training mental health first aiders a form of psychosocial risk prevention?
It is a useful building block, at the secondary level: trained employees learn to spot signs of distress and signpost help. A first aider signposts, does not treat, and never stands in for a health professional. But training ten first aiders in a team under chronic overload does not fix the overload. The two levels complement each other, and the employer’s obligations are not discharged by the second alone.
One last thing
This is not solved by a poster campaign. It is solved by decisions about how work is organised, taken and then held to. The first step costs a morning. If you want to talk it through for your own company, write to me and I will tell you frankly whether a structured approach is justified.
Sources
- Malakoff Humanis, Absenteeism study 2026, 9 June 2026. newsroom.malakoffhumanis.com
- INRS, launch of the French occupational health plan 2026-2030, 5 June 2026. inrs.fr
- European Parliament, procedure 2026/2023(INL), accessed 2 September 2026. oeil.europarl.europa.eu
- INRS, psychosocial risks, key points. inrs.fr
- Expert panel on the monitoring of psychosocial risks at work, report submitted to the Ministry of Labour. travail-emploi.gouv.fr
- French Labour Code, article L. 4121-1, duty of care covering physical and mental health. Legifrance
- French Labour Code, article L. 4121-2, general prevention principles. Legifrance
- French Labour Code, article L. 1152-1, workplace harassment. Legifrance
- French Labour Code, articles R. 4121-1, single risk assessment document, and L. 4624-1 and following, individual health monitoring, Legifrance.
- 3114, French national suicide prevention line. 3114.fr
