Managing stress: What to do about workplace stress
Section four of the Personnel Today Management Resources one stop guide to managing stress, covering: the Beacon of Excellence model for stress prevention; securing top management commitment; risk assessment; and HSE stress management standards. Other sections .
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When we say we are stressed, we are usually referring to the symptoms of stress - difficulty concentrating, feeling fatigued and constantly tired, lower motivation and feeling less 'job involved', sometimes sleeping badly and having difficulties making decisions. Recognising stress in others is also usually based on the symptoms that they are showing. For instance, when someone we know is somehow not their usual self, not showing their usual enthusiasm for work, looks down and generally unwell. These are early signs of stress and are based on physiological changes within the body.
A lot of organisational responses to workplace stress deal with the symptoms of stress. Helping someone stressed takes the form of occupational health interventions such as medical help, counselling and health interventions. These are known as 'tertiary' interventions and are mainly associated with the rehabilitation of those who are already suffering physically, in some way or other, from workplace stress.
Stressors, on the other hand, are the things that we need to concentrate on to operate a preventative approach to stress management. Identifying what causes stress and eliminating or minimising the causes are the best methods for combating stress. This approach is called the 'primary' approach towards stress management.
When the stressors cannot be eliminated and the primary approach is unavailable, and to try and avoid suffering from the symptoms of stress and needing tertiary intervention, we may introduce 'secondary' interventions. Secondary interventions are those designed to help us to cope. Stress-awareness training and lifestyle management are examples of secondary interventions.
The Beacon of Excellence model
In 2003, the HSE published the Beacon of Excellence Model for stress prevention (see Section 7 ). This model captured the essence of a comprehensive approach towards dealing with workplace stress. It was based on best practice data from a range of leading organisations throughout the UK and was design and developed by Joe Jordan and former colleagues from Robertson Cooper.
The model can be used to help businesses to introduce a stress prevention strategy that is coherent and workable. It has also been proven to work in improving business performance (see Section 3 ).
The Beacon of Excellence Model may be viewed as an all-encompassing organisational approach which recognises that individual and organisational health are interdependent, and that the responsibility of stress prevention and management should lie with everyone in the business.
An effective stress prevention strategy is helped by the presence of a culture in which staff and managers are all involved in process and are willing to continually communicate, analyse and revise their plans in a positive atmosphere of communication, culture, participation and negotiation.
Top management commitment
If a business has many employees, especially key employees, who are stressed, the business will suffer. There will be an impact on absence, accident rates, even the potential for litigation; but most importantly there will be an adverse impact on productivity and the bottom line. Top management teams are more likely to support interventions if issues such as the expected outcomes, resources, costs and cost effectiveness can be clearly identified. To do this, a business case needs to be made to persuade key decision makers and budget holders to invest the necessary resource required to deal with stress issues.
Luckily, business case material is coming into the public domain and this can be used to help build a strategic rationale in lobbying and negotiating with top managers.
What is clear, from both the research domain and evidence from practice is that stress-prevention activities are unlikely to be implemented successfully without the long-term commitment of management.
Top management commitment can be demonstrated not only by ensuring that stress-prevention and employee health and well-being initiatives are well funded, but by giving personal commitments and shouldering personal responsibility for stress prevention.
Risk assessment
Risk assessment is a key feature of the Beacon Model. An understanding of situational factors needs to be developed if we are to identify and reduce workplace stress.
The HSE now advocates risk assessment for stress. Some people call this 'psychosocial' risk assessment; others call it 'stress auditing'.
Employers have duties:
under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999:
- to assess the risk of stress-related ill health arising from work activities
under the Health and Safety at Work, etc, Act 1974:
- to take measures to control that risk.
The HSE expects organisations to carry out a suitable and sufficient risk assessment for stress, and to take action to tackle any problems identified by that risk assessment.
It has developed a five-step risk assessment process (above right):
With an appraisal of work activities to assess danger to health and safety, risk assessment enables a business to recognise any inherent or perceived hazards prior to developing an intervention to deal with the risk. Continual analysis enables planned interventions to be evaluated and, if necessary, realigned to keep track with organisational changes as and when they occur.
Achievement can be measured by making use of information from employee attitude surveys, absenteeism and sickness data, compensation claims, performance reviews and cost/benefit analyses, which also enables judgements to be made regarding the effectiveness of selected programmes and whether other options should be considered.
Psychosocial risk assessment is not well developed. It is only just becoming a business imperative, mainly because of the HSE's focus on widespread publicity of the need to do it.
As with most new ideas, it will take time for businesses to become competent in psychosocial risk assessment. What will help, and what is strongly advised, is a better liaison between health and safety managers trained in more traditional physical risk assessment and those with expertise in employee health and well-being such as occupational health specialists or HR specialists.
Those organisations that do have a coherent programme of psychosocial risk assessment are more likely to also be operating good practice in other areas of the Beacon Model, since risk assessment underpins criteria such as primary level intervention, management participation, and is usually a key element of a stress prevention strategy.
Experts from outside the department or business can undertake a psychosocial risk assessment. This can short circuit problems associated with 'manager dependent' processes. Manager-dependent processes are those where the identification of workplace stress is left to the manager, who first of all identifies the level of risk and who might be affected and then the manager decides appropriate management action. Although line managers are absolutely central to the effective implementation of a comprehensive stress prevention programme, a manager-dependent process will almost certainly not deal with one of the most pernicious of workplace stressors - the poor manager.
Proactive engagement by outside experts can be triggered by extraordinarily high absence rates, extraordinarily protracted rehabilitation, high staff turnover rates, as well as by other means such as exit interviews, 'whistleblowing', and low productivity.
The Five Steps to Risk Assessment
Step 1: Identify the hazards
Identifying the hazards has been made easy for businesses with the HSE Management Standards (see below). Reviews of the hazards can reveal more wide-ranging stress-inducing factors than those indicated by the HSE, such as pay and reward factors and work-life balance factors. But the factors that they have constructed have been shown in large-scale research to be the common stress inducing difficulties for the modern working environment.
What would be important is to assess how relevant the HSE factors are for a specific business and the job roles within a business and to then widen the list of hazards to include others that may be business specific.
The measurement of these hazards is dealt with in step 3 of the five-step process.
Step 2: Identify who might be harmed
This step is closely related to step 3. So much so that it is not necessary to expand on this step much. In essence, the most important part of this step is to decide who, in the business, is likely to be most vulnerable to the hazards identified in step 1. This will guide you to those parts of the business that require a proper evaluation of the risk.
Step 3: Evaluate the risk
This is the most important part of the risk assessment process. It is concerned with the measurement of the risks. The process of stress auditing is dealt with elsewhere in this publication. Stress auditing is the most effective and most reliable way of evaluating the stress risks in a business.
The measurement can be done quantitatively, qualitatively or using a mix of both methods. It is advisable to undertake a quantitative assessment of the risk by doing a stress audit using survey methodology (see earlier information) but there are other ways of gathering data.
Using business processes to gather information
There may already be information that can be used to indicate potential problem areas.
High levels of sickness absence. What are the reasons for absence, is it stress- related absence?
Low levels or productivity
High employee turnover - conducting exit interviews will help to determine if the turnover is being caused by stress factors
Performance appraisal discussions may uncover sources of pressure
Team meetings may provide information about the state of things in a work group
Existing staff surveys provide pulse information. Is it possible to reformat the staff survey so as to tap into the six management standards?
Health and safety committees and working groups
Training sessions and away days
Committees, such as works councils.
Focus groups
Staff in a business are usually the most valuable voices to listen to when introducing a stress prevention strategy. Staff know and understand what their own issues are and most of the time they know what the solutions ought to be - if only people would listen to them.
Focus groups are a way of listening to them and engaging them in a participative way. But, the focus group has to be run properly in order to get the best out of them. In fact, more damage than good can be done by poorly managed focus groups.
The main purpose of the groups is to use the expertise and the knowledge of the staff to build an accurate picture of the key stressors in their jobs. It is also possible to use the focus group participants as a sounding board. For example, it is possible to use the expertise and experience of the participants in the focus group to verify the evidence of stress gained from other sources, such as survey data.
One of the most important ways of making best use of focus groups is to ask participants to brainstorm solutions to the stress problems that they are raising. The solutions can be built into the stress prevention strategy almost directly provided they are reasonable and pertinent.
Organising a focus group
The number and make up of focus groups depends on:
The stress issues that are likely to be debated
People who are likely to be experiencing the same kind of stressors, eg, frontline staff dealing directly with the public
Practical and logistical factors.
It is important to set up groups where participants are likely to share common interests, encounter similar kinds of sources of work-related pressure and feel comfortable in expressing their views in front of the other group members.
What not to do when planning composition of focus groups:
Bring together people with vastly different grades or levels of seniority
Bring together staff and their bosses unless there are very special reasons for doing so
Have more than eight participants. People need space and airtime - it's better to run more focus groups than have larger numbers in the group.
Facilitation of focus groups
Facilitators manage the process. The better trained and more experienced the facilitator, the more effective the focus group will be. A poorly facilitated focus group can do a lot of damage. This point cannot be emphasized enough. The facilitator must be able to make judgements about the difference between pressure and stress, daily hassles and serious barriers to well-being, political statements and actual and real problems, sensible and pragmatic interventions, and 'save the earth' solutions.
The facilitator can be external and independent - this may be very important to some staff - or from HR, occupational health or health and safety. Or it could be a combination of all of these. The key responsibilities of the facilitator are:
To assure confidentiality
To record the information sensibly
To encourage openness and honesty
To discourage exaggeration and politicising of issues
To control the ebb and flow of discussion and make sure everyone gets a chance to speak
To deal with both the issues and the possible solutions
To keep the focus group to time.
What to expect
A letter of invitation to participants will help to clarify the purpose of the focus group and to set expectations in advance. Some prior thinking time for the participants will help them to reflect on the issues that they wish to raise. The letter should also make it clear that they will be expected to think about possible ways of alleviating the problems. Other issues that can be in the letter include confidentiality, time, date and location of focus group and the names of the facilitators.
Step 4: Record the findings
An audit report will contain the main findings of the risk assessment and should highlight the following:
Groups of people (defined according to sensible demographics such as job role, work location, work team, etc) who are at risk of high levels of stress
The key stressors that are putting these groups of people at risk
The plan of action required to deal with the risks, or to help protect those at risk
A communication plan for disseminating the information within the business to all staff and to top management
An indication of timescale agreed with the business and staff representative groups.
The action plan will include the following:
What the problem is
How the problem was identified
What the response is going to be
How the solution was arrived at
Some key milestones and dates for them to be reached
A commitment to provide feedback to staff on progress
A date for reviewing against the plan.
An example of a real life action plan from Somerset County Council is presented in Section 3 .
Step 5: Review and evaluate
The best way to evaluate the effectiveness of the interventions is to undertake another stress audit survey. This survey is a way of taking another temperature check and a means of providing people with a chance to say whether they think the interventions have worked or not.
This can be done across the whole business again or it can be done only among certain groups of staff such as those highlighted in the audit report as a hotspot. It is important to give enough time for the interventions to have an effect, but don't leave it too long otherwise it will be more and more difficult to determine whether it is the intervention that is working or some other confounding factor.
It is advisable to undertake an annual stress risk assessment across the whole business. For larger organisations such as large local authorities or large blue-chip companies this may be unrealistic and a two-yearly survey may be more pragmatic. But for other businesses an annual audit is advisable.
Another way of determining the effectiveness of the interventions is to review the gross staff data. For example, the absence trends, attrition trends, accident trends, productivity trends, etc, may all be used to get a picture of the effect of the interventions.
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Stress auditing methodology will very often meet with
resistance among managers who may fear that it will open up a can of worms
without delivering any significant improvements in stress levels. The
extent to which any significant improvements are achieved is dependent
entirely upon the post-auditing activity that is undertaken. Many
businesses never undertake an audit without giving a wholehearted
commitment to acting on the results, and this commitment and subsequent
action planning not only improves the quality of working lives of staff,
but also helps to insulate the company from litigation. Gaining the
commitment from managers to act on the results of the audit is the most
beneficial way of dealing with concerns such as: 'What if I don't like the
audit results?', 'How much of the information should I share with my
staff?', 'Will it make any difference?'. Those who commit to post-audit
action planning need to share the results with their staff, and have the
opportunity to say 'whatever the results, my concern is about making
things better'. |
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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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