Stockton are in the process of holding focus groups having completed the analysis of their survey results.
Stockton obtained initial commitment to the Standards from senior management by holding a meeting between the Corporate Management Team and their Stress Partner. A steering group was then developed once the CMT were fully engaged. The main tool in obtaining commitment from frontline staff was via the council’s internal ‘message of the day’ email and newsletters. Stockton have found staff briefings on the Standards to be less successful due to ‘very poor attendance’ – in part due to the distance between offices resulting in employees being unable to attend. Stockton also intend to distribute the results of the survey to all staff.
Focus groups have been organised on a departmental basis with one group per department. A facilitator has been allocated to each group.
The intention is to carry out a new stress survey late in 2006 and to compare issues raised noted in the survey to information obtained from a study of cases encountered by HR or Health and Safety officers.
It was felt that implementing the Standards has been overly ‘paper-intensive’ and Stockton would have preferred a greater degree of independence from HSE in developing the project. It is, however, understood that it was in the nature of SIP1 that organisations would be following the SMS process with a lower degree of flexibility than will be the case for organisations implementing them in the future.
It was also noted that implementation of the Standards created significantly more demands on resources than had been expected. As the officers responsible for the implementation did not have a separate budget for this project, all work had to be carried out centrally and by existing staff.
Benefits from implementing the Standards, which were noticeable prior to the conclusion of the project, included the opportunity consult with other organisations using the Standards and develop best practice, working with HSE in a positive way and building an effective relationship with Acas. The Council found the relationship with HSE particularly useful and felt that the assistance, rather than enforcement, led approach taken by HSE was particularly useful.