10 March 2008
Bridget Leathley

The figures on stress-related illness are often quoted, and justifiably so. The HSE says 13.8 million working days were lost in 2006/07 due to work stress, depression and anxiety. Citing HSE research from 2001, the TUC estimates the financial impact is around £3.7 billion. The cost now could be even higher.

Beyond the statistics, individual case studies of people off work for months, family breakdown and, in extreme cases, suicide make it as important to understand and reduce work-related stress as other, more easily recognisable hazards.

Cause and effect

There are numerous websites outlining the causes, symptoms and treatment of stress. Your first stop should be the HSE site, where "stress" appears in the ever-growing list of "health and safety topics" (or you can go straight to the stress section.

You can sign up to a free e-bulletin service which flags up updates to the HSE's material on stress. From the publications section there are links to the HSE's priced guide Managing the Causes of Work-related Stress: A Step-by-step Approach Using the Management Standards (HSG 218, 2007) and to free leaflets, including the short guide Tackling Stress: The Management Standards Approach (INDG 406, 2005). There is also a link to Business Link's guidance for small firms on managing stress.

For those too stressed to read it, Working Together to Prevent Stress (MISC 686) is also available as a "talking leaflet". I found it difficult to learn much from this, as the well spoken but dull voice didn't make the information easy to follow, or emphasise headings appropriately. The leaflet takes about 12 minutes to listen to, but there's no way to pick out individual sections. The audio file doesn't seem to be linked from the HSE's stress pages, so you'll need to click here to find MISC 686 under "stress prevention".

Voluntary guidance

For specialist advice, mental health charity MIND's site covers causes of stress, behaviour and feelings, and offers tips to tackle the problem. The Mind Guide to Managing Stress and Mind Troubleshooters: Stress summarise this information. They can be accessed here and you'll find stress under "s".

The Mental Health Foundation (MHF) has a general article on stress as well as a more specific article on work-life balance. The stress article includes some practical tips on dealing with stress in the short term, some as basic as taking a walk. Mental Health in the Workplace is free to download. The first half covers the same areas as other sources, but the second half goes on to discuss how employers can use audits, checklists and discussion groups to clarify the extent to which they have problems with stress and the measures they can take as a result.

For a medical definition, visit NHS Direct's stress section. The site outlines causes and symptoms, offers advice on prevention and treatment, and provides links to other websites and contact details for specialist support organisations, such as the Rural Stress Information Network.

The BBC provides a more general summary of work-related stress, covering symptoms and ways to cope. From it's mental health section, select either feeling stress or responding to stress.

Not to be outdone, Channel 4 provides "stress busting strategies" in its guidance on stress.

Up to standard

The starting point for practical advice on how to manage stress is the HSE again; www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/index.htm. The overview presents a flowchart showing how the standard "five steps" (HSG 65) can be applied to stress. Since my last review of this topic, the HSE's online information has improved enormously. It's to the executive's credit that so many of the other sources I looked at refer back to the HSE management standards and other HSE publications.

The HSE provides advice on the measures to take before and within each step, including an example stress policy, plus an indicator tool (a pdf questionnaire on stress) and a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for analysing the information. There appears to be no integration between the questionnaire and the spreadsheet, so once employees have completed the questionnaire, the answers must be copied into the spreadsheet for analysis.

The before you start stage in the HSE's management standards pages includes making a business case and developing a stress policy. Part of your business case could include the HSE's estimate that, on average, each case of ill health caused by work-related stress, depression or anxiety results in 30.2 lost working days.

Joe's story

It's useful to look at how other companies have developed their safety policies, and the business benefits they've gained. Several websites provide both organisational and individual case studies.

On the HSE's stress pages, there are examples of organisations that have taken action to tackle work-related stress under "good practice", while individual cases are examined in "advice for individuals".

The workingforhealth.gov.uk site is a government-led initiative sponsored by the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department of Health, the HSE, the Scottish Executive and the Welsh Assembly Government. Founded on the idea that working is good for health, it aims to bring together employers, unions and healthcare professionals to improve the health and wellbeing of working-age people. Click here to read about organisations whose programmes have tackled stress. Joe's story is also worth a look, providing a more individual, applied view.

If the experience of local government is relevant to you, the Local Government Employers website includes well laid-out, readable summaries, with hard data on the problems and successes of stress-management strategies applied in a number of councils around the country.

The charity Mind Out offers case studies of how companies have tackledmental health more generally, including work-related stress. Case study 3 deals specifically with the employment of people with existing mental health problems, while case study 2 (Consignia - the Post Office) provides a detailed guide to "health and wellbeing support" available in the organisation. It inlcudes company case studies and individual case studies.

The working minds toolkit also includes case studies, as well as advice on risk assessment and organisational stress policies.

Assess it

Since work-related stress now accounts for more than a third of all new incidences of ill health (HSE figures), it should be considered in risk assessments, alongside manual handling; slips, trips and falls; and other common hazards.

After providing even more startling figures - for example that 50%­­-60% of all lost working days are due to stress - the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work supplies useful outline advice on risk assessment. Disappointingly, the agency risk assessment tool is a pdf on general risk assessment, not stress risk assessment, though it does include a stress checklist.

Good practice resources on stress has some more promising headings, but many of these lead to empty pages or foreign documents, or back to the HSE website. Under case studies, some of the country-level examples might be useful if you are in certain industry sectors; for example, see the Netherlands for stress in retail and catering and Austria for vehicle repair.

The UK National Work-Stress Network provides a simple outline for a stress risk assessment with some useful links - such as risk assess it - while the questions in the TUC Stress MOT could form part of your stress audit. Other useful links take you to the It's about time! campaign and to relevant news briefings.

While the main purpose of the www.stressmanagement.co.uk site is to sell you its Stress Management Through Mindfulness (SMM) programme, there is a quick online stress test you can take to give you an idea of how bad your individual problem is.

The best medicine

One of the outcomes of your stress risk assessment may be that you need to redesign some jobs. Acas has some straightforward advice on job design in its advisory booklet Stress at Work. The booklet lists six main causes of stress and for each one describes the action you can take to counter the cause. It provides practical advice and examples, as well as links to other relevant Acas publications.

If you want to read more about stress in book form, the International Stress Management Association has a list of publications on its website. From here click on "stress occupational". There is a downloadable report on work-related stress, and there are links to Amazon and HSE Books where you can buy publications.

Advice for individuals on dealing with harrassment, discrimination and bullying is available at www.workworries.com A number of sources mention yoga and other relaxation techniques as ways of reducing stress, and some companies bring yoga teachers into the workplace. For a list of qualified teachers, see the website of the British Wheel of Yoga.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists recommends a 70-minute tape or CD called Coping with Stress at Work, presented by the late Professor Anthony Clare.

Since laughter is of course the best medicine, when you've had enough of checklists, audits, risk assessments and policies, take a look at the jokes and film clips tagged "stress" at www.office-humour.co.uk

For more help on how to use humour to counteract stress in the workplace, see www.humourus.co.uk or www.fifthdimension.biz if you're based
in Scotland.

Categories:
Health, Stress/bullying, Article, Mental health

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