Enacting Return‐to‐Work Effort: The Employers' Perspective on the Dutch Return‐to‐Work System

Activation‐oriented social policy in the Netherlands assigns employers and employees a legally mandated, shared responsibility for facilitating the Return‐To‐Work (RTW) process of sick‐listed workers. This study examines how employers perceive activation‐oriented RTW responsibilities, focusing on the drivers shaping the employer's and employee's RTW efforts and the organisational actors supporting policy implementation. Data was collected through 25 semi‐structured, retrospective interviews with employers, who had experienced a negative evaluation of their RTW efforts at least once. Interview transcripts were analysed using systematic, qualitative template analysis building on policy‐implementation themes. Building on the employers' perspective, results showed several drivers of RTW effort of the employer (i.e., legal, financial and ethical drivers) and the sick‐listed employee (i.e., ability‐, motivation‐ and opportunity‐related drivers). Furthermore, results highlighted how employers perceived the enactment of RTW efforts to be supported by an intraorganisational tripartite of the Human Resource (HR) department, supervisor and occupational health specialists. Concluding, this study sheds light on how employers perceive the drivers and (roles of) actors that play an important role in the policy implementation within the daily RTW practice of organisations. Our findings highlight tensions between the legal mandate of shared responsibility and employers' perceptions of accountability, underscoring the need for mutually reinforcing RTW practices that integrate employer drivers with employees' ability, motivation and opportunity. The Dutch case, with strong employer obligations and sanction mechanisms, offers lessons for other welfare states.