Managing stress: Jargon buster
Section eight of the Personnel Today Management Resources one stop guide to managing stress provides definitions of key terminology on managing stress. Other sections.
Audit Action Plan
The list of actions compiled after the stress audit. It should include reasonable interventions and delivery dates and should be 'preventative' in nature.
Beacon of Excellence Model
This is a model developed by Robertson Cooper under the auspices of the Health & Safety Executive that specifies the best-practice approach that organisations should take in introducing a comprehensive and effective stress prevention strategy.
Breach of Duty
The term that the judiciary uses when an employer is found not to have applied the duty of care.
Compliance
Employers must comply with the duty of care and principle of prevention and other guidelines set out in the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Act 1999.
Continuous Improvement Model
The term adopted by the HSE to denote regularly reviews of effectiveness of stress prevention interventions. It may require a re-audit of stress risks on a regular basis.
Duty of Care
Employers have a duty of care to protect the health of employees. In legislative terms health include psychological health and wellbeing as well as physical health and safety.
Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)
A programme of support for staff that require help dealing with problems. The problems that EAP's deal with usually include personal problems and outside of work problems as well as work-related problems.
Eustress
Positive pressure, the pressure that helps to motivate us.
Foreseeability
An assumption that any reasonable employer knew or should have known that psychiatric harm or injury was foreseeable as a result of stress from doing the work the employee is required to do.
General Adaptation Syndrome
Suppression of the immune system under chronic or severe stress, leading to a general deterioration in psychological and physical health.
Narrow Target Interventions
These are interventions that are put in place to deal specifically with stress prevention.
Norm groups
Groups of people against which one can be compared, for example, the general population norm group represents everyone in the country, a financial services norm group represents people who work in financial services.
Presenteeism
The condition in which an employee is suffering from stress that is seriously affecting his or work performance but who chooses not to go absent for a variety of reasons.
Pressure-Performance Curve
The relationship between pressure and performance showing the low levels of performance/boredom region due to lack of pressure, and the low levels of performance/exhaustion due to excessive pressure.
Primary Interventions
Strategy or course of action put in place to eliminate or minimise the causes of stress (the stressors), as far as is reasonably practicable.
Principle of Prevention
According to the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, employers must adhere to the principle of prevention -if stress risks can be prevented they must be.
Psychosocial Risk Assessment
Another term for a stress risk assessment.
Resilience
A term that has grown in significance over the past five years. In its purest form it is an opposite force to stress, enabling the holder to withstand stressful situations. It is sometimes used to denote a positive personal characteristic (such as an inherent personality trait). Could be expressed as a set of behaviours, including lifestyle behaviours that help to insulate a person against stress, as there is no doubt that it can be learned and practised.
Rust out
Boredom and low levels of performance due to a lack of motivating pressure.
Secondary Interventions
Strategy of course of action put in place to help staff cope with pressures that cannot be eliminated because they are an inherent element of the job or of general working life. Interventions include resilience building programmes and other training and support mechanisms.
Standardised Stress Indicators
Survey tools for measuring stress, which have been validated in research and allow for benchmarking against norm groups.
Stress
The result of excessive pressure and is defined as the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressure or other types of demands placed on them.
Stress Audit
A competently managed review of stress risks, including a quantitative assessment (for example, survey data or the use of gross statistics such as absence data) and a qualitative assessment (for example, focus groups, interviews and policy reviews).
Stress Hazard
Another term for a stressor, something that has the potential to cause psychiatric harm.
Stressor
Something that causes or leads to the experience of stress.
Stress Prevention Strategy
A strategy endorsed by the senior executives of an organisation, which outlines its strategic approach to dealing with workplace stress risks and the support mechanisms provided to employees to help deal with any problems arising.
Stress Risk Assessment
An assessment of the risks of stress in staff (how likely is it that staff will suffer stress) and identification of the causes behind the risks. Employers have an obligation to ensure that they measure and manage the risks to employees arising from stressors in the workplace.
Tertiary Intervention
Strategy or course of action put in place to support people who are experiencing difficulty coping with stress. They including counselling support, medical health interventions and employee assistance programmes.
Wide Target Interventions
Put in place not necessarily to deal with a specific stress problem but to minimise the chance of a stress problem arising.
|
Section three: The business case for a stress prevention strategy Section four: What to do about workplace stress Section five: Developing a strategy Section eight: Jargon buster
|
