Good practice: managing workplace stress
In the first of two articles on workplace stress, we
look at practical ways to tackle it and what tools are out there to
help.
Headlines
- An estimated 442,000 British workers believe they’ve
experienced workplace stress
- The average length of time someone takes off work with stress
is 30.6 days a year
- Self-reported work-related stress, depression or anxiety in
Britain accounts for an estimated 13.5 million lost working days a
year
- Stress is the second most common reason for people to take time
off work
(These statistics were taken from the 2007/08 Labour Force
Survey).
Why take work-related stress seriously?
It’s a legal requirement: if you allowed
someone’s physical health to be damaged by work, you know you’d be
breaking the law and leaving yourself open to legal action.
Allowing someone’s mental health to be damaged by work is no
different.
Work-related stress costs money: HSE statistics
show that in 2007/08 stress, depression and anxiety accounted for
nearly half of all days workers took off as sick. If you reduce
work-related stress, you’ll make a big dent in your sickness
figures.
Work-related stress damages productivity: even
where employees manage to stay at work when stressed, they will not
work as productively over the long term. It makes business sense to
tackle stress.
What should I do?
Stress should be managed in the same way as any workplace
hazard: it should be subject to a risk assessment. The five steps
to risk assessment can be applied to stress:
Step one: identify the risk factors. The HSE
describes six main risk factors for work-related stress, and
provides the management standards relevant to each. These are
covered in the next section.
Step two: identify who can be harmed and how.
Collect information from within the organisation. The HSE
Management Standards Indicator Tool (MSIT) can be used to survey
the workforce. Encourage managers to report signs of stress early
on, and monitor this information to look for patterns.
Step three: evaluate the risks. Discuss
problems identified in steps one and two with staff representatives
and decide priorities. The HSE recommends using focus groups of
between six and 10 people to develop solutions. Solutions may focus
on the demands of the job, relationships between people, the
control employees have over their role or the support each person
receives (for example, training and supervision).
Step four: record your findings. The HSE
provides an example of an action plan for recording problems and
solutions to stress issues. It’s important that all employees and
management see and understand the action plan.
Step five: monitor and review. The plan needs
to be monitored to make sure actions are taken by agreed dates.
What are the management standards?
The management standards help you to both identify the risk
factors and assess what to do to reduce the risk. They are:
Demands of the job: an employee’s ability to
cope with their job can depend on workload, the complexity of the
work, patterns of work (for example, shift work) and the work
environment. Not having enough work to do or work that is too easy
can be as stressful as having too much, or work that’s too
difficult.
Control over the work: for example, an employee
may be happier about doing a repetitive task if they can choose
when to do it.
Support from colleagues and managers: employees
need to know how to get support when they need it. Managers should
recognise that there will be times when employees need extra
support. For an example, see the UK government’s ‘Working for
health’ website.
Relationships with other people: as well as
promoting positive behaviour, organisations need to have policies
in place to deal with unacceptable behaviour such as harassment,
bullying or physical assault.
Understanding job roles and responsibilities:
people are more motivated when they understand how their role fits
into an organisation. Employers need to check that employees don’t
have conflicting roles – for example, being responsible for the
safety of a process, but being paid a bonus on higher
production.
Management of organisational change: this is
particularly relevant now, when employees may be in fear of losing
their jobs. Organisations need to make sure any organisational
change, however small, is managed and communicated ahead of rumours
and guesswork.
Some actions will tackle more than one risk area. For example,
job re-design can manage the demands of the job, give the employee
more control over their work and help them to understand their
roles and responsibilities. ACAS
includes job design in its guide to stress at work.
What tools can I use to help me?
IOSH has its online
Occupational Health Toolkit covering work-related stress.
It includes training materials, factsheets, guidance and a section
on carrying out a stress risk assessment. There’s also information
on early intervention and rehabilitation.
The HSE also has some useful tools on its website, including the
Management Standards Indicator Tool (MSIT) and the Stress
Management Competency Indicator Tool (SMCIT).
The SMCIT focuses on four management competencies:
- managing emotions and having integrity
- managing and communicating existing and future work
- managing the individual in a team
- managing difficult situations.
The TUC’s stress MoT is made up
of a people survey and an organisational survey.
The people survey asks employees whether they feel they’re
stressed by work, and whether it causes them any harm. It then
records the symptoms of stress experienced, and the causes in terms
of demand, control, work-life balance, relationships, change,
conflicting roles and working environment.
The organisational survey asks 15 questions about stress policy,
record keeping, risk assessments, training, support and
information.
IOSH Links
IOSH
Occupational Health Toolkit includes stress
IOSH Manchester and North West Districts Branch
meeting on HSE stress management standards
Other links
HSE stress website
TUC Stress MOT
UK National Work-Stress Network
Mental Health Foundation
European Agency for Safety
and Health at Work
Results from the Labour Force
Survey for the HSE in “Self-reported work-related illness
and workplace injuries in 2007/08” on the HSE website