Managing stress: Developing a strategy
Section five of the Personnel Today Management Resources one stop guide to managing stress, covering: stress prevention strategies; example stress policies; stress interventions; general considerations on stress; and identifying responsibility for stress. Other sections.
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Learn what a stress policy should include Understand how stress prevention should be approached Examine different levels of stress intervention Consider who should be responsible for stress
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Stress prevention strategy
The development of a strategic plan needs to address intervention aims, the roles and responsibilities of staff, and the resources of the business. Both managers and employees should be involved in this process to make sure it addresses the right issues. Managers who understand the role they play in supporting employees and influencing health and wellbeing, not only emotionally, but also by ensuring effective and consistent communication, will help to ensure the success of the strategy.
At the very least a business should have a stress policy. This will lay down the way the business will deal with stress issues. It is advisable to include in the policy a statement relating to the preventative nature of the stress prevention strategy.
Some businesses incorporate their approach towards workplace stress into other policies such as dignity at work policies, bullying and harassment policies, or more general health and safety policies.
1. Why the policy is important and why the business needs the policy
2. Who is responsible for what:
a. Corporate responsibilities
b. Managerial responsibilities
c. All staff responsibilities
3. A definition of stress, best taken from reputable sources
4. An indication of what the business strategy is for dealing with stress, in particular, the general activities the business will be undertaking as a matter of course, such as introducing a counselling service, introducing resilience training and undertaking risk assessments
5. Full consultation with staff, including signatures of staff representatives
6. How the policy will be evaluated and when it will be reviewed.
This example policy, provided by the HSE, is relatively short and succinct and is ideal for businesses that do not have their own policy.
Introduction
We are committed to protecting the health, safety and welfare of our employees and recognise that workplace stress is a health and safety issue and acknowledge the importance of identifying and reducing workplace stressors. This policy will apply to everyone in the company and managers are responsible for implementation and the company is responsible for providing the necessary resources.
Definition of stress
The HSE defines stress as "the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressure or other types of demand placed on them". This makes an important distinction between pressure, which can be a positive state managed correctly, and stress which can be detrimental to health.
Policy
The company will identify all workplace stressors and conduct risk assessments to eliminate stress or control the risks from stress. These risk assessments will be regularly reviewed
The company will consult with Trade Union Safety Representatives on all proposed action relating to the prevention of workplace stress
The company will provide training for all managers and supervisory staff in good management practices
The company will provide confidential counselling for staff affected by stress caused by either work or external factors
The company will provide adequate resources to enable managers to implement the company's agreed stress management strategy.
Responsibilities - managers
Conduct and implement recommendations of risks assessments within their jurisdiction
Ensure good communication between management and staff, particularly where there are organisational and procedural changes
Ensure staff are fully trained to discharge their duties
Ensure staff are provided with meaningful developmental opportunities
Monitor workloads to ensure that people are not overloaded
Monitor working hours and overtime to ensure that staff are not overworking and monitor holidays to ensure that staff are taking their full entitlement
Attend training as requested in good management practice and health and safety
Ensure that bullying and harassment is not tolerated within their jurisdiction
Be vigilant and offer additional support to a member of staff who is experiencing stress outside work, such as bereavement or separation.
Responsibilities - occupational health and safety staff
Provide specialist advice and awareness training on stress
Train and support managers in implementing stress risk assessments
Support individuals who have been off sick with stress and advise them and their management on a planned return to work
Refer to workplace counsellors or specialist agencies as required
Monitor and review the effectiveness of measures to reduce stress
Inform the employer and the health and safety committee of any changes and developments in the field of stress at work.
Responsibilities - human resources
Give guidance to managers on the stress policy
Assist in monitoring the effectiveness of measures to address stress by collating sickness absence statistics
Advise managers and individuals on training requirements
Provide continuing support to managers and individuals in a changing environment and encourage referral to occupational workplace counsellors where appropriate.
Responsibilities - employees
Raise issues of concern with your safety representative, line manager or occupational health
Accept opportunities for counselling when recommended.
Function of safety representatives
Safety representatives must be meaningfully consulted on any changes to work practices or work design that could precipitate stress
Safety representatives must be able to consult with members on the issue of stress including conducting any workplace surveys
Safety representatives must be meaningfully involved in the risk assessment process
Safety representatives should allowed access to collective and anonymous data from HR
Safety representatives should be provided with paid time away from normal duties to attend any trade union training relating to workplace stress
Safety representatives should conduct joint inspections of the workplace at least three months to ensure that environmental stressors are properly controlled.
Role of the safety committee
The joint safety committee will perform a pivotal role in ensuring that this policy is implemented
The safety committee will oversee monitoring of the efficacy of the policy and other measures to reduce stress and promote workplace health and safety.
Signed by:
Managing Director:
Date:
Employee Representative
Date:
(Source: HSE)
Whichever way the business introduces its statement on dealing with stress the most important thing of all is to ensure that the policy is widely distributed and communicated to all staff, and to ensure that managers, in particular, have a full understanding of their role and their obligations in executing the policy.
A participative approach to stress prevention should be applied to each element of the process, from risk assessment through to selecting the intervention and evaluating its success. Research by Bond and Bunce cited in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (see Section 7 ) has shown that the involvement and empowerment of individuals at various stages of the intervention improves the likelihood of a positive result.
This collaborative approach helps to achieve successful outcomes through co-operation between people in the decision-making processes. Staff from all levels of the business are encouraged to participate, with external consultants and researchers acting as facilitators and evaluators of the process if required.
Examples of staff participation include:
Training managers in stress awareness
Management training in stress awareness (can be called a variety of different things 'resilience training', 'stress awareness training', etc) is a hugely important way to draw in managers into the stress prevention agenda. It helps people not only to recognise and understand what stress is, but also helps them to recognise it in others and provides information on how to deal with stress in their team. Businesses that do this well are a long way towards achieving positive business benefits.
Undertaking employee/staff surveys
Running focus groups with stress and workplace pressure as a topic
Operating 'expert networks'
Regular staff appraisals
So long as such appraisals provide opportunities for staff to raise stress issues. Staff appraisals that provide opportunities for staff to discuss stress and pressure issues in a constructive way can be classed as an example of a participative approach. Appraisal interviews that do not provide opportunities for such discussions, or appraisals that do but are poorly conducted can be a source of stress.
The annual staff appraisal process, and performance management in general, is a much overlooked factor in the stress field. Researchers have virtually ignored the stress problems that can arise from poorly delivered performance management, and practitioners have done little to advertise the catastrophic effects on employee stress levels of poor performance management processes and poorly executed staff appraisals. Nor have they promoted the huge positive benefits of a well-designed and well-delivered performance management process.
Primary interventions are interventions aimed at dealing with the stressors and providing people with more control over their work situation
Secondary interventions are interventions aimed at helping people to manage stressors without trying to eliminate or modify them
Tertiary interventions are interventions that are aimed at rehabilitating people who have been unable to cope.
Primary interventions
Interventions are key to a stress prevention programme, particularly those that work at the primary level. Even so, primary level intervention is ambitious. Interventions take a long time to organise and they can cost quite a lot of money both in terms of resource requirements and in people's time. It is also difficult to measure their effectiveness.But, to address work stress at source by looking at underlying causes, which organisations should be doing, then primary level interventions are critical.
Secondary interventions
Secondary interventions are a vital element of the stress prevention activities of an organisation. It is unreasonable to think that managers can deal with all sources of stress in a working environment. Although many stressors can be dealt with, there are some stressors that are particularly harmful, which managers may not be able to deal with. These include stressors such as job insecurity, economic contraction, competitor behaviour and customer behaviour. Helping people to cope with these stressors, or just helping people to cope with daily hassles is a key element of helping to improve the overall sense of wellbeing of staff.
There are a variety of secondary interventions that are possible. Stress awareness training is the intervention that comes to mind most frequently. Other interventions include:
Healthy lifestyle programmes
Exercise provision (facilities, sporting clubs, concessions for club membership, etc)
Relaxation provision (quiet rooms such as prayer rooms, maternity rooms, massage, meditation training, etc)
Stress coaching
One-to-one and team-based stress coaching
Social support groups
For example, a change management group
Or clubs and societies
Training and education programmes
Time management, project management and a whole range of other management training
Informational support
In the form of literature about stress, health and well-being.
Stress management is a partnership between employee and employer. In many respects, one of the most valuable contributions that employees can make towards stress management is in understanding and managing their own personal stress through secondary interventions.
Tertiary interventions
Tertiary interventions are concerned mainly with rehabilitation. Most classifications of interventions would place the following services under tertiary provision:
in-house and external counselling services
Employee assistance programmes (EAPs)
Rehabilitation programmes (alcohol, drugs, etc)
Critical incident management
Complementary therapies
Life coaching.
The importance of counselling
Counselling is an individual-level intervention. It has been shown through high quality research that counselling has beneficial effects for people who are suffering from stress. Studies have shown that counselling helps to accelerate return to work from long-term absence, and improves work behaviour including work performance and problem behaviour such as alcoholism.
A research project undertaken at the in-house counselling service of the Post Office, cited in An Evaluation of Stress Counselling by Sadri and Cooper (see Section 7 ), showed that counselling was effective in a variety of ways. Using pre- and post-measures, and using control groups, the results were:
Clients who underwent counselling were less anxious, less depressed, suffered fewer psychosomatic symptoms (mental health symptoms) and had higher self esteem than before they went into counselling
Client coping behaviour changed with less coffee drinking, less smoking and less alcohol consumption, and more relaxation techniques, exercise and better work-life balance
No significant differences on any of these measures were found in the control group
There were statistically significant falls in days lost due to absence in the six months following counselling.
The positive results of benefits gained from counselling provide evidence that it improves people's sense of well-being. What is also important to note is that neither job satisfaction, nor organisational commitment shows any improvement pre- or post-counselling. This strongly reinforces the point made by many practitioners in the field that all three levels of interventions - primary, secondary and tertiary - are critical for businesses in the fight against work-related stress. Counselling is an individual level intervention and has the biggest impact on the people being counselled.
Many counselling providers recognise the need to work across all three intervention levels and many counselling professionals and businesses offering counselling services provide advice and guidance to businesses at the primary and secondary level. This is illustrated in the following case study from London Electricity Group (now EDF Energy).
Case study: The counselling approach at EDF Energy
Where an employee's problems are work-related it is common practice for the counsellor to establish a link back into the line manager and HR representative. At the discretion of the employee, a meeting between employee, counsellor, line manager, HR representative and union official where relevant, is set up to discuss changes needed in behaviour, flowchart and workload, and other threat inducing factors. Thereafter, the employee usually undertakes a phased return to work.
The counselling aspect of the employee support programme (ESP) is run by an external network of counsellors managed by a clinical psychologist in London. One of the key elements of the ESP is the incorporation of 'round table' meetings to form a standard part of the counselling service. Staff referred to the counselling service are provided with three sessions with the clinical psychologist, with a further four more sessions if required and upon recommendation by the occupational physician. If, in the opinion of the psychologist, the problems are work-related a series of round table meetings are organised. These meetings are usually conducted with the employee, his or her manager, the counsellor and a representative from both occupational health and the HR function. An agreed range of actions are published following each round table meeting.
Apart from aiding the rehabilitation of employees with stress problems and preventing or minimising sickness absence, these round table meetings are a very robust way of identifying shortfalls in management skills which can then be tackled in a sensitive but evidence-based way, helping to close the risk management loop.
Wide target and narrow target activities
Activities can be aimed quite specifically at dealing with stress 'the problem' and therefore can be classed as 'narrow target' activities. Such activities might include counselling services, stress coaching, stress awareness training, and psychosocial risk assessment. They are nearly always in response to a need to manage stress.
Other activities are part of improvements in general good management practice that have a positive impact on the health and wellbeing of staff. They may or may not have been precipitated by a need to manage stress. These are the 'wide target' approaches to dealing with stress. Management development training would be a good example of a wide target activity.
The best organisations do both. They initiate activity that is designed to deal with those who are already stressed or who will become stressed by providing help and support through occupational health services and counselling services, and positive return-to-work conditions that are conducive to rehabilitation. They also provide initiatives that work towards a positive managerial culture in an effort to prevent people suffering from stress in the first place. A well executed stress risk assessment in the form of a stress audit helps to ensure the effectiveness of wide target intervention by enabling managers to target interventions in a tailored way.
Most people, especially HR professionals in a business will recognise the benefits of combining wide-targeted interventions and narrow-targeted intervention in a stress prevention plan.
Many best practice businesses use a combination of wide targeting and narrow targeting, and use them in a very proactive way. An example is London Electricity Group (now EDF Energy) where narrow targeting of stress prevention can be seen in a very successful employee support programme (see earlier). This is combined with a wide targeting approach where stress prevention is only one element of an integrated and pervasive organisational culture of safety that emphasises safety behaviour by all staff. This fits with its commercial imperative to deliver power safely to its customers.
Both narrow targeting and wide targeting activities are essential for a good stress prevention programme.
Financial investment and the lifecycle of stress prevention
Successful, blue-chip private sector businesses invest more heavily in much bigger teams of specialists per head of population, including bigger teams of health and safety specialists, regular and extensive health promotion and health screening, health and lifestyle provisions, management development and training, and the ergonomics of the working environment.
Wide target activities are usually more expensive than narrow target activities. This is the case when one considers the cost of, for example, high quality management development, or high quality ergonomics of the working environment. This may explain why public sector organisations tend to emphasise the narrow target interventions over the wide target interventions. They are less costly and do not need the same level of manpower to implement and maintain.
The life cycle
The stress prevention lifecycle appears to run as follows:
Early years: Narrow target activity:
Tertiary interventions: providing employee assistance, counselling services and occupational health services
Secondary interventions: stress awareness training, stress coaching
Some targeted primary interventions, such as work-life balance initiatives for conformance to employment legislation, i.e. equal opportunities legislation, etc.
Risk assessment for conformance to health and safety regulations, plus some psychosocial risk assessment such as stress auditing.
Later Years: Wide target activity:
Top management commitment allied with considerable resource investment. Top management buying into the "good health is good business" adage.
Stress prevention strategy, for example a clear understanding at corporate level of necessary and relevant activities for managing stress across the organisation
Integrated psychosocial risk assessment and corporate action planning
Primary interventions, such as recruitment and selection improvements, career development, flowchart planning, performance management, 360-degree performance appraisal, management development programmes, and culture change programmes, etc.
Who is responsible for stress prevention?
Different people within a business carry some of the responsibility for ensuring a comprehensive approach towards stress prevention. In some businesses, stress management is delegated to occupational health. In others it is the responsibility of the HR expert. In others, particularly in SMEs, the responsibility falls to the health and safety representative:
Health and safety experts
Occupational health experts
Human resource experts
However, one of the most important characteristics of best practice in stress prevention is the integration of all of these roles in a coherent and strategic plan.
Businesses that draw on the work of all three experts are far more likely to be operating a clear and coherent approach towards a comprehensive stress prevention programme than those that don't. In many respects, where an organisation is clearly lacking in some aspect of good practice, it was usually because one of the sets of experts was not properly engaged into the stress prevention plan.
Each set of experts has a key role to play in ensuring that a comprehensive stress prevention programme runs smoothly:
Health and safety experts have strength in risk assessment. They have been trained in the exercise of 'identify, control, and remove' that is the basis of all risk assessment techniques. These techniques are the same for stress risks as they are for any other kind of risks, and there are now many stress risk assessment tools on the market that health and safety managers can use to help them in this task.
The HSE's principle of prevention (Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999) requires an organisation to combat stress risks by identifying the hazards and dealing with them at source, trying to prevent them in the first place or controlling those that cannot be prevented. Measuring the risk and monitoring the risks over time and in a systematic way ensures that the health and safety experts are contributing to the stress prevention plan.
Occupational health experts have strength in a number of areas by providing employee assistance services, training staff in stress awareness and stress resilience, and rehabilitating staff back into work. Their expertise is not only in work centred approaches towards good health, but also the more contemporary 'life-centred' approach. Increasingly, occupational health professionals are acquiring the mantel of the experts in people health issues. And since stress has a strong foundation in poor lifestyle choices, lack of exercise and low levels of occupational physical wellbeing, it is important that occupational health experts are fully engaged in the stress prevention plan.
Occupational health experts have a strong link into senior managers of the organisation. They often have representation at board level and this high level influence can be critical in helping to secure resources to fund interventions.
In addition, many occupational health specialists are the leaders in the formulation of the stress strategy. In many cases, the occupational health expert has the most comprehensive understanding of the causes and consequences of stress in their organisation. They generally better recognise the differences between the daily hassles that everybody must endure at work, and the medical difficulties that highly stressed people suffer can as a result of chronic workplace stress.
Perhaps one of the most disappointing aspects of the working environment is that too often the occupational health units are under-resourced, with too few people - sometimes also doing other jobs - and too little budget. This is a disappointment because good practice in stress prevention starts with well-trained occupational health professionals who appropriately lobby, influence and use health and safety experts and the HR community in supporting a comprehensive stress prevention plan.
HR professionals have a central role to play. People management is crucial to the way in which a business culture evolves and is maintained. The HR policies, procedures and their engagement with staff through a whole range of activities - including induction, the appraisal system and other performance feedback systems, staff attitude surveys, job redesigns, restructuring programmes, performance management and support - help to define the way people experience life at work. It is through these channels that HR experts can use their influence to ensure that staff participation in the design of working practice improvements is initiated.
Human resource experts are close to the business imperatives. HR professionals are linked into senior management and have an ideal opportunity to lobby and canvas the support of top management. They can combine their links to top management with a good understanding of how to stimulate and develop good management practice. Much of what they do is, by its nature, concerned with employee development, management development and other culture defining activities. Since we know that dealing with workplace stress is as much about improving the culture of the business and the capability of management and style of management that managers adopt, the HR role is critical in the development of a stress prevention plan.
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Section three: The business case for a stress prevention strategy Section four: What to do about workplace stress Section five: Developing a strategy
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