Waitrose - stress case study

Who are they?

Waitrose is a major high street retailer with branches all over the UK.
Waitrose is a division of the John Lewis Partnership and all employees are
Partners in the business.

No of employees:

over 43,000

Business Sector:

Retail

Why we first became interested in work related stress?

We’ve been interested in the subject of stress for many years. At Waitrose, the Management Standards were the main driver for looking at work related stress (WRS) in our organisation. We already had many preventive measures in our business; however, the standards gave us an evidence-based framework for ensuring that there were no gaps in our provision..

How we did it:

We took a holistic approach to implementing stress risk assessments. We used the in house primary, secondary and tertiary framework to look at the areas where we already prevented and tackled stress in our organisation.

• The primary deals with matters such as policy and procedure, personnel practices, employee representation and communication and management practices. 
• The secondary covers manager, partner and job specific training plus partner benefits.   

• In addition, the tertiary incorporates the support systems that are in place to support partners should work related stress affect them i.e. counselling, occupational health.

It was also useful to establish where the gaps were.

We rolled this out at the same time as a new risk assessment approach. This risk assessment was for all health and safety issues, but a separate format was used to assess psychosocial hazards. This was based on the management standards.

• Business issues often take precedence over what are seen as lower priorities and WRS was not seen as a big problem in our organisation, as we had had no serious cases. The way that we got WRS on the agenda was to find a senior management sponsor, who helped obtain board level engagement via the Personnel Director. We were then able to take the project forward with her endorsement. The timing helped too, as the board had already agreed to roll out a new risk assessment approach across the business.
• Our main aim was to establish our work related stress policy and risk assessment across Waitrose. Our organisation has stores all over mainland UK, so this was a huge challenge. We did not set specific targets for sickness absence or turnover, as we didn’t consider these factors to be a huge problem in our business before we started. The partner survey is completed annually and this gives a good measure of partner satisfaction. This hard data will be reviewed annually by a working group.
• We are now at a stage where we can set up a group to monitor work related stress on an ongoing basis. We plan to use hard data, such as sickness absence / turnover figures, numbers of individual stress risk assessments / work related stress cases and soft data, such as our internal survey to monitor how we are doing. We have a strong culture of employee participation, as they are all “partners” within the firm rather than employees. Therefore, our communication channels would easily pick up hotspots and issues.
• We fully consulted employees and their representatives on our stress policy and risk assessment.
• We communicated the policy to all managers within our business, working closely with the Safety manager to ensure that it fitted with the main risk assessment processes. Partner Survey results are communicated fully via meetings, in house magazines and intranet site.

Interventions are in place, for example local managers and staff set their own actions, where appropriate, depending on any issues found in the survey and on their stress risk assessments.

One example of this was to put additional measures in place for Customer Service Partners. There can be a large seasonal shift in workload and pressure in this department, with Christmas and Easter being particularly pressured. Managers ensure that Partners are trained to deal with any call and additional support is available for Partners who have dealt with a particularly aggressive customer. Managers also employ seasonal temporary staff to ease the work load. Partners have an opportunity to raise concerns via a local forum - this is a mechanism which works well across our business.

• If any Partner develops work related stress, our Occupational Health Advisors carry out bespoke assessments and action plans are developed between the individual, the line manager and the OHA.

Impact on the organisation:

Looking back at our stress project we now feel that we are assured that we are fully compliant with the legal requirements. However, the main impact has been to raise stress awareness with both senior and line managers. We took the opportunity to communicate the importance of the line manager role and this will be worked into future line manager training courses.

Advice to Other Retailers:

Waitrose is a unique organisation but we would advise securing senior management commitment and board level engagement right from the start. This will undoubtedly maximise the impact of tackling work related stress. 

Never underestimate the time that it takes to get a project rolled out across an organisation of any size and complexity.