Health and Safety Update (October 2008)

Workplace stress - is it prevalent in your business?

What would you do as an employer if an employee reported suffering workplace stress to you? Would you know how to react or would you be cynical about the whole thing? Where and how would you start to address the issue?

All employees within an organisation can be vulnerable to stress depending on the pressure they are under at any given time.

Stress can be caused by work as well as by personal issues and problems outside the workplace (e.g. financial or domestic worries). Whatever the cause, stress can leave employees feeling unable to cope with the pressures of work with the result that performance suffers.

We all need some pressure in our lives - it makes our work satisfying and helps us meet deadlines. But it's all about striking the right balance. Too much pressure without having the chance to recover causes stress, which can be damaging to our health.

Workplace stress is different for everyone - what is stressful for one person may not be stressful for another. It can depend on your personality type and how you have learned to respond to pressure.

A recent study commissioned by the Health and Safety Executive has indicated that:

• approximately half a million people in the UK experience work-related stress at a level they believe is making them ill;
• up to 5 million people in the UK feel 'very' or 'extremely' stressed by their work;
• a total of around 13 million working days are lost to stress, depression and anxiety every year;

Addressing workplace stress requires a team approach involving safety professionals, human resources and workforce representatives.

Stressors

The HSE has identified six key areas which, within the working environment, can lead to stress for employees. These are:

• Demand- workload, work patterns, and the working environment;
• Control- how much control does the employee have over his activities at work;
• Support- bad managers and ineffective training for the employee to carry out tasks efficiently;
• Relationships- conflicts, bullying, harassment etc;
• Role- how the employee fits in and is valued within an organisation;
• Change- is there sufficient support during changes to an employee's activity?

Workplace stress policies

The first step you as an employer should take is to introduce a Stress Policy for the workplace- contact the Telephone Advice Service if a policy is not contained within your Mentor Management System. The policy should provide clear guidelines for managing stress in the work environment and should:

• recognise stress at work as a health and safety problem;
• detail arrangements for accessing counseling;
• formalise arrangements for assessing the causes of stress in the workplace;
• introduce measures to reduce and prevent stress;
• detail arrangements for employees suffering as the results of stress.

The only way that a stress policy will work is if there is clear senior management commitment and employee involvement. Successful implementation depends upon this commitment from all areas of your business.

Risk assessment

Employers have a duty to ensure that risks arising from a work activity are properly controlled. Unlike the risk assessment for physical hazards, it is likely that a risk assessment on stress will be carried out at an individual level – the person and activities level.

Individuals

Primarily, the employer should identify who is at risk from which stressors. Most of the information necessary to complete this task is probably already available to you. Such information would include sickness absence records, employee turnover, declining quality, and production performance. An employee survey will also help identify potential areas for improvement, as well as who is at risk.

Carrying out a stress audit is one of the best ways to find out if stress is a problem within your workplace. A stress audit involves talking to employees – either individually or in groups – to find out where there may be problems. Stress also seems to be statistically higher among corporate managers, teaching, administration and health and social care sectors- you may want to consider these employees as a priority.

Organisational set-up

These are issues such as:

• How do you communicate with employees?
• Are people offered training and development to improve performance, or are they removed from the business, or out of their role, without consideration for development?
• Is change management something that the Company does without adequate planning and method?
• Does the Company have effective processes in place to listen to individuals' concerns?
• What is the appraisal process like? - Do all managers follow it?

The answers to these and other questions will help decide if the Company is doing all it can to help control stress. Some of the information might be gained from the staff survey mentioned before or from an unbiased audit of the organisational 'set-up'.

Control measures

Controlling stress at work can be approached by taking into consideration work organisation, communication, training, and infrastructure and processes. Clearly they are not stand-alone issues but have areas of overlap.

Work organisation

The stress risk assessment may indicate that the way the work is organised is unsuitable. If this is the case, work processes and workloads need to be re-evaluated and redesigned.

Communication

The emphasis on stress needs to be formally communicated to everyone in the organisation in an open and honest way. They will then be better placed to raise concerns they might have and get actively involved

Training

Employees need to be given training in order to manage stress in their working lives. One of the first ways to achieve this is through stress-awareness sessions. Such sessions are generally focused on outlining the tell-tale signs of the condition, and discussing the misconceptions about the subject. The sessions can help promote the idea that it is acceptable to talk about mental health, and introduce people to some common coping methods to enable them to find ways to mitigate the effects of stress. Training should also be given to managers as they can often be the cause of workplace stress.

Infrastructure and processes

It is important to have systems in place to help deal with individuals who suffer from the condition. A quick process should be in place for individuals to highlight to the right people that they have a problem without fear of reprisal.

It is critical that managers know their limits and when to hand over to those more skilled in such matters, e.g. human resources, occupational health, etc. For instance, should an individual go off sick, the issue stops being a health and safety matter and instead becomes one of absence management. Plus, by having in place a policy and procedures for stress it should be easier to identify those who are using stress as an excuse and those who really do need support.