Step 5 - Monitor and review

Measure and share your success

It is essential that you review any action you take to tackle stress. This section contains advice on how to ensure actions are taken forward and measure your success.

Before you begin Step 5, you should have completed Checkpoint 4 - Record your findings:

• Created and agreed with senior management, employees and their representatives an action plan for the implementation of solutions.
• Shared your action plan with all employees, including dates for monitoring and review.

How to review your work

It is essential that you review any action you take to tackle stress. There are two elements to this:

• Monitor against your action plan to ensure the agreed actions are taking place.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of the solutions you implement.

Monitor against your action plan

Periodically check that agreed actions are being undertaken, eg that meetings are being held, or that there is evidence that certain activities have taken place.

Evaluate the effectiveness of solutions

How you do this will depend on what kind of solutions you have developed. It is important to ask those involved whether they feel the solutions are having the desired effect. You may decide you only need to speak to a sample of those involved. Alternatively, you may feel it is important to ensure that the intervention is working for everybody.

Another way to demonstrate the effectiveness of your plan is to collect data on employee turnover, sickness absence and productivity, and to measure progress against emerging trends or changes in this data.

The timing of your reviews will depend on how long it will take to implement each intervention and how long the focus group expects it will take to have any impact. This could be days for a simple intervention (eg an adjustment to the physical environment), or months for piloting a complicated long-term solution (such as a new rostering system).

Follow-up surveys

One way to measure progress is to use the surveys again after a period of time. You may want to consider an annual survey. This would be as well as any arrangements that have been established to talk about stress on a regular basis.

It is important to remember that the Standards are about making steady improvements in the way you manage stress. It is critical that you are committed to continuously working with employees to identify and address the problems in your workplace that could lead to stress-related ill health.

• Help on interpreting results from the second survey

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