FEATURE
SEVEN FOR STRESS
Workplace stress can lead to poor health, lower productivity and increased accident and sickness absence rates if not properly managed.
Stress – the body’s response or reaction to excessive or prolonged pressures – can cause a range of mental and physical ill health conditions or trigger pre-existing conditions, including depression and anxiety, back and shoulder problems, heart disease and some cancers.
In 2019-2020, 17.9m working days were lost to work- related stress, depression or anxiety, accounting for 51% of all work-related ill health cases and 55% of all working days lost due to ill health, according to the latest HSE statistics.
https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/causdis/stress.pdf
The rate of work-related stress, depression and anxiety has also shown signs of increasing in recent years and this has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, with employees juggling work with personal demands while adapting to home working. But there are a number of ways we can reverse this trend by tackling the source of the issues within our own workplaces.
Carry out a stress risk assessment to help you identify problem areas and the steps that should be taken to control them. Gather data to help identify issues including rates of sickness absence, how much sickness was due to stress and anxiety, staff turnover, employee relations, and grievance and disciplinary issues. As stress is considered a hazard, employers have a legal duty to protect their employees from stress at work by doing a risk assessment and acting on it. HSE has a risk assessment template available
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To coincide with International Stress Awareness week, Alex Minett, Head of Products & Markets at CHAS, offers some tips for managing workplace stress.
here. HSE's stress management standards can also help to simplify this process by identifying and managing six areas of work design that can affect stress levels: demands, control, support, relationships, role and change.
www.hse.gov.uk/stress/risk-assessment.htm https://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/wbk01.pdf
Work together to decide what actions to take to achieve the steps you have outlined. As stress is often a symptom of poor employment relations, managers should take all employees' opinions into consideration. These ideas can be used to help form the basis of a company policy that informs employees of what to do should they feel stressed at work, or if they are experiencing mental ill health. Ideas can be shared through attitude surveys, specific stress-related audits or focus groups, discussion groups, action planning meetings, and/or one-to-ones.
Set up a wellness programme if you want to provide extra resources and support, and appoint a steering group to lead the process. Involving everyone in the organisation, from senior management to frontline staff, should make implementing the programme easier. Consider bringing an independent adviser such as a psychologist into your discussion groups so they can act as the facilitator and create a non- judgemental environment to encourage people to contribute. Ensuring that the expertise of staff is valued will also result in greater ownership of any changes that are implemented.
Communicate regularly with employees to ensure they're being challenged but not overloaded with
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