Member Article

Stress Management

With Business Link

Later this month, the winners of the UK’s first ever National Stress Management Awards will be announced. It is concerning to think that a system of recognition is required to encourage effective handling of stress in the workplace: yet also heartening that some firms are dealing with it so well that they are deserving of an award!

Stress is part of 21st century life and can have a massive impact on the effectiveness of a business but, as an employer, you must ensure that it is not work that is causing an employee’s illness. As part of your overall health and safety risk assessment, you need to assess the risks of stress caused, or made worse, by work.

One of the best ways of doing this is to carry out a stress audit. The Health and Safety section of the Business Link website has a guide on how to assess whether stress is a problem for your business. You can start by using recent exit interviews, sickness absence statistics and staff turnover records to judge your current position and then build on this by surveying staff on their attitude to and experience of stress at work. Failure to take such action could leave you open to a compensation claim from workers who fall ill due to work-related stress.

Once you’ve identified possible stress problems in your business, you need to tackle the causes. A guide on managing work-related stress can be downloaded from the HSE website. Suggested solutions include:

• considering how you might reduce people’s workload, if that is highlighted as a potential cause of stress.
• making sure staff take their holiday entitlement - and take your own.
• reviewing people’s performance so that they know how they’re doing and are able to give feedback about potential problems.

Sometimes employees may suffer stress from non-work related matters such as relationship difficulties, bereavement or debt problems. Although you have no legal responsibility to tackle such causes, you should remember that they can have a significant impact on their performance so it’s a good idea to adopt a sympathetic and understanding approach.

After all, identifying and dealing with stress is not just about abiding by your legal requirements. A report by the Shaw Trust in June 2006 indicated that 36 percent of absences are caused by stress, anxiety or depression, costing the national economy as much as £9bn per annum. And if that thought alone inspires you to manage stress in your workplace, then the Stress Management Society (the organisation behind the awards) will have done its job and, who knows – you might be picking up one of its trophies next year!

For Business Link services in your local area, call 0845 600 9006 or visit the website on www.businesslink.co.uk. Business Link services in the North East are supported by the European Regional Development Fund, through the Government Office for the North East, and One NorthEast.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .