Preventing and Managing Stress

The Health and Safety Executive estimates that 13.4 million working days per year are lost due to employee stress, anxiety or depression.

There is, however, a great deal that employers can do to minimise the likelihood of employees experiencing stress and to ensure the situation is effectively managed within the workplace.  

Workplace Initiatives to Manage Stress

Employers can begin by giving high priority to mental health and stress when conducting risk assessments, making an objective assessment of the volume of work involved in each job, and taking positive measures to ensure that workloads, targets and deadlines are reasonable and within each employee's coping resources.

Employers should also ensure that they provide each employee with adequate training, particularly prior to a promotion or transfer to different work.

Responsibility should be placed on line managers to ensure that no employee works excessive hours and that all employees take proper breaks from work. It is good practice to ensure that all members of staff take their full annual holiday entitlement and not to permit payment in lieu of holiday (except where an employee is leaving).

Other initiatives include:

• conducting anonymous attitude surveys and including questions about factors in the workplace that cause stress or anxiety;
• adopting a flexible attitude towards working patterns and hours of work; 
• keeping staff fully informed at all times about what is going on in the organisation generally, for example through an information and consultation committee;
• consulting staff members on all matters that affect them and taking on board the feedback that they give;
• implementing an effective and accessible grievance procedure and ensuring that employees know that they can use it without fear of retribution; 
• training managers to provide feedback to staff on job performance and ensuring that this feedback is regularly and effectively delivered;
• devising and implementing a stringent anti-harassment/bullying policy and accompanying confidential complaints procedure; and
• providing confidential counselling so that members of staff have the opportunity to talk through any stress-related problems with a qualified person.

Given the high costs to business of sickness absence, it is important for employers to put in place and implement sickness and rehabilitation policies. By implementing measures to facilitate and promote employee health, employers can reduce the likelihood of sickness absence occurring.

Occupational Health Services

Involvement of occupational health professionals is a particularly effective tool in the management of long-term sickness absence and, as one of their functions is to carry out an examination of sick employees, it is important to allow for this in employee contracts.

The key objective of an occupational health service is to protect and promote employees' health, taking into account the working environment and all its challenges. Occupational health specialists have the dual role of supporting the employer by assessing the effect of employees' health and fitness on their ability to perform their jobs, and supporting employees by examining the effect of their work and the working environment on their health and wellbeing.

Larger employers have the option of employing their own doctors and/or nurses. The alternative is to contract with a firm of occupational health practitioners for the provision of defined services.
The provision of health screening is the most common type of service that occupational health practitioners provide to employers. They can:

• conduct pre-employment medical checks to confirm whether or not a chosen job applicant is fit to perform the job into which the employer proposes to recruit him or her;
• provide routine health screening for existing employees;
• assess the likelihood of recovery and return to work of employees who are off sick; and
• check that employees who have had a period of sickness absence are fit to return to work and what, if any, adjustments would be helpful to them.

In addition to these health-screening services, an in-house occupational doctor or nurse can be allocated responsibility for:

• health education among the workforce;
• stress management policies and practices, including conducting stress audits;
• workplace design and ergonomics;
• conducting audits of working conditions and the working environment; and
• education and policy support in areas such as substance abuse, smoking, HIV and stress.
• wellness, and occasional theme days such as a "stress awareness day" or "healthy heart day".

In addition to these measures, providing support mechanisms such as employee assistance programmes can be used to promote health and wellbeing and provide help and support to individuals with personal or workplace problems. Employers should ensure that they have in place a clearly worded sickness absence policy, including rules on notification, required evidence, payment of sick pay and return-to-work interviews.