Health and Safety
Executive / Commission
Management standards for stress
Before you begin Step 3, you should have completed Checkpoint 2 - Decide who might be harmed and how:
There are a variety of sources of information that can help contribute to a general picture of the current risk for work-related stress in an organisation, and identify where the biggest problems seem to be.
When you have collected initial information for your risk assessment (as described in step 2), you should confirm your findings, explore what this means locally, and discuss possible solutions using a representative sample of your work force.
A good way to decide what needs to be done is to bring together groups of about 6 – 10 employees as a “focus group”. Talking to a selection of employees from a specific work group will allow issues from the findings of the risk assessment to be explored in more detail, and also take into account local challenges.
To begin to develop solutions, the focus group should consider the good practice outlined in the ‘states to be achieved’ of the Management Standards, and whether this good practice is happening. This approach can give structure to your focus group meeting, and help you make a local action plan to tackle stress.
Developing solutions is often the most difficult part of tackling the possible causes of work-related stress. Each workplace and each worker is different, meaning that it is not possible to describe one set of solutions for all circumstances. There are some good examples of what other organisations have done to successfully deal with problematic working conditions that could help you and your employees:
The overall aim of each focus group is to draw up recommendations in the form of an action plan (see step 4). It is reasonable that employers/senior management may have to prioritise solutions from the different action plans, but they should communicate back to staff the general results of the risk assessment and their plans for continuous improvement, with dates for review.
It is important that you communicate with management, employees and their representatives. You should keep them updated as you go through this process. For example, it is unrealistic to expect employees to participate in focus groups to discuss problems without a commitment to at least share the outcome with them soon after.
The surveys and focus groups may identify that individuals are experiencing problems that the majority of employees are not. The solutions you develop for the majority of your employees may not address individual problems. However, you still have a duty of care to take steps to protect the health and well-being of these employees too.
It is essential that you develop ways for employees to raise their concerns. These could include the following:
Before you begin the next stage, you should have done the following: