01 May 2007
Jocelyn Dorrell

Implementing a consistent and unified stress policy in an organisation the size of the University of Manchester is no mean feat. The university has 11,000 employees, ranging from academic and administrative staff to technical and manual workers, along with all the other roles (such as finance and HR) you would expect to find in a large organisation.

Andrew Mullen, deputy director of human resources, says there were various motives behind the university's decision to review its existing policy on stress and launch a new initiative in 2005.

"Clearly there was a compliance issue," explains Mullen. "But what we tried to do was fit the policy in with a strategic approach to staff wellbeing. We didn't want just to do something that came across as 'we're doing this because we have to' ? we didn't want it to be seen as a tick-box exercise. If you're not seen to be taking it seriously, it obviously leads to cynicism."

So the university fitted the stress initiative into a range of measures under the banner of "Wellbeing", which Mullen likens to the NHS's Improving Working Lives programme. The Wellbeing "brand", as Mullen describes it, includes health-promotion schemes such as sport and exercise programmes, family-friendly policies, dignity-at-work initiatives and a counselling service.

Survey spam

The university began to look at stress in earnest in mid-2005. The "new" University of Manchester had been formed a few months earlier, in October 2004, from the merger of the Victoria University of Manchester (commonly known simply as the University of Manchester) and UMIST (the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) and this merger was the impetus for a review of existing policies on stress management.

"The first thing we decided was that we needed to get the benchmark of where we were at in terms of metrics," recalls Mullen. "We decided we would use the HSE management standards because they were 'benchmarkable'."

The university looked to an external agency, Stress Ltd, that could conduct a stress survey on its behalf. "We felt it was quite important that we had an outside organisation that was receiving the data independently," says Mullen, "to give people confidence about the confidentiality of that data."

He has no regrets about using an external company and would recommend buying in help where budget allows.

"I heard a colleague from another organisation who'd done the survey say that you'd have to be crazy to use an outside organisation, it's a waste of money," he says. "But I'm confident that when I compared their participation rates with ours, the difference might have been down to the way it was marketed, or even down to people saying, 'actually, do I want to send this to my HR director or to my health and safety office?'

"I do think it gives people a level of confidence if you've got another organisation handling the data on your behalf and you don't see the responses at all. I think that's really important." 

Every member of staff received the survey. It asked for demographic details but no names, and the way the data was broken down made it "difficult if not impossible" for anyone to identify a respondent, so employees were assured of anonymity. The university chose to distribute the survey largely by email, "which initially backfired on us," admits Mullen.

"Because people got an awful lot of spam, anything that came from a name they didn't know or an organisation they didn't recognise, they deleted," he explains. To overcome the problem, the university sent out an email before the survey reminder went out, warning people that they were going to receive a reminder and what the header would say. "That seemed to do the trick," he says.

The survey took only around seven minutes to complete (staff were told this in advance) and hard copies were made available to employees who did not have access to PCs. The university launched the survey in November 2005 and staff had until the end of January 2006 to complete it.

All academic

There was a good response rate: 46% of staff filled it in, whereas only 25% had returned a previous general staff survey. Mullen attributes the high rate of return to a "very proactive approach" to publicising the survey, which included a letter from the university president highlighting the importance of a good response to ensure a representative sample so the university could fulfil its responsibilities.

In the main, the findings did not come as a surprise to Mullen. Staff reported moderate levels of stress risk under most of the HSE's six headings (demands, control, relationships, support, role and change) but while there was "clear room for improvement", urgent action was not required for all staff. Academic staff came out as the most vulnerable: they reported high levels of demands on their time and attention, but also high levels of control over their work.

"Clearly academics have control and we scored very well on that, and basically the finding was that this offset the issue surrounding demands," Mullen explains.

The next step was to establish focus groups, which were informed by the results of the survey and facilitated by Stress Ltd. Mullen and his team started with academic staff. Initially they asked for volunteers for the focus groups. But there are risks in self-selection, and the team got very little response so they abandoned the idea.

After the poor response to the call for volunteers, Mullen used staff lists to target people randomly. This was still an uphill struggle: for the academic staff, he had to approach 10 people to get one to agree to participate.

"Seven minutes filling in a survey is one thing but spending an hour and-a-half in a focus group when you're busy is another," he concedes. To maximise the chance of recruiting participants, the focus groups for academics were carefully timed: after exams but before graduation.

There was a total of 19 focus groups across the university, each with eight members, in July and September last year. "They teased out a number of things," says Mullen, "and we're dealing with a lot of the stuff now."

Time out

That "stuff" includes excessive hours, staff not using their full annual leave allowance and misalignment of individual goals and organisational goals.

The groups also revealed that the university's sickness absence policy wasn't being applied consistently across the institution: return-to-work interviews weren't always held and the university was not consistently referring on people who reported work-related stress.

Mullen reported the focus groups' key findings to the senior management team. With colleagues, he devised appropriate actions which they recommended to management and which were accepted. "There were some tough things there to get to grips with," he reflects.

"If, for example, you identify that some people are working excessive hours and as an organisation you have a very ambitious agenda, if you then say 'we're going to limit the hours that people work in some areas' or 'we're going to make it a clear expectation that everyone takes their annual leave', it's not an easy message to give. Some people might see that as compromising an ambitious agenda."

One factor was that managers sometimes lacked the necessary skills to deal with staff issues. "You've got to be open about that," he says. "And it gives you an impetus for extending and developing leadership training and extending training provision for managers on recognising and managing stress."

Another difficult issue the HR team have addressed is bullying. While the findings in this area were generally good across the institution as a whole, bullying behaviour was reported in parts. In response, the university has reviewed, and is relaunching, its dignity-at-work policy, and is putting in place some extra monitoring arrangements for reported incidents. It is also appointing a network of harassment advisers who staff can go to informally in the first instance.

Presidential support

Mullen has enjoyed support from senior management from the early stages of the stress initiative. "From the start, I made it clear that it was my view that it had to come from the top of the organisation," he says. "The president has made public statements, about bullying for example, which gives a very powerful message. Things like that have been very helpful."

On the whole, feedback about the project has been very positive, but Mullen acknowledges "some cynicism" at middle-management level ? although this has not been widespread.

"Once you commit yourselves to something, if you don't do it you clearly lose credibility," he says. "So I think the fact we've done things - it's been visible - means people's cynicism has subsided. That's certainly our sense, anyway."

He believes Manchester now has a good stress-management policy in place; next on the agenda is to improve the university's ability to monitor, "which has not been as good as we would have liked." To this end, the university is investing in a new sickness-absence module on its HR system to improve management information. It has also just introduced contractual hours for the first time for middle managers (who previously didn't have defined hours), and a new email protocol is being launched aimed at reducing the volume of unnecessary messages.

Reflecting on the initiative since its launch in 2005, Mullen is careful about premature cost-benefit analysis, arguing that the measure of success will be whether stress-related sickness absence falls in the longer term.

"There are measures you need to be cautious about, I think. If you use a measure of incidence of reported harassment, then initially - if you raise awareness - you're going to get an increase," he points out. "You can't necessarily draw a direct link between all the activities you have and outputs."

His measure of success in the shorter term will be the results of the next stress survey, which he hopes to run in September this year and which will include questions identical to those in the 2005 survey.

Campus walks

"If we started again, we'd probably manage the process more formally in a project management framework," Mullen concludes.

The initiative gathered momentum, he says, because of the number of things that come under the Wellbeing umbrella and the number of departments and services involved: from the counselling service, health and safety, and equality and diversity, to estates and catering. The Wellbeing facility now offers a range of activities at lunchtimes and in the evenings, such as campus walks, yoga and sports, and training courses on subjects such as assertiveness and dealing with conflict.

Many of these services were around before the stress initiative but the university is now taking a more strategic approach, says Mullen, and linking all the various elements in a more coherent way. He believes the marketing has been very important: any activity that has a positive impact on staff health now carries the Wellbeing badge.

"The philosophy is about doing our bit, but helping staff to recognise what's available for them," he explains. "We're trying not to take a nannying approach. It's about saying, 'if you're feeling stressed, there is a range of things we can do but there are things you can do too'."

The HSE's stress-management standards are available at www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/index.htm.

 

Categories:
Stress/bullying, Article, Mental health