01 May 2006
Dr Rosemary Anderson

The comforting thing for health and safety managers about a risk assessment for stress is that, like any other risk assessment, it follows the five steps of identifying hazards, deciding who might be harmed and how, evaluating risk, recording findings and reviewing them.

But unlike many others, a stress assessment needs a great deal of thought and preparation before it can be carried out effectively. It is too easy to rush in full of enthusiasm to implement the Health and Safety Executive's guidance and carry out an audit without any thought for the process as a whole. Who, for example, will support the audit in the organisation? Who will support the health and safety manager with the extra workload that comes with the assessment?

Preparation really is important. The shortest possible time between the start of a project and carrying out a risk assessment is probably three months. This is appropriate in a small organisation or in a larger one where there has been some previous stress awareness and management training for line managers. If you plan to train line managers and others from scratch then you should leave at least six months. Anything up to 18 months is more likely.

A stress risk assessment and any follow-on stress management programme are most effective if the process is run as a formal project. In large organisations, the health and safety manager needs to form a project group or working party and act as, or appoint, a project manager. In smaller operations, the project group may comprise just a few interested members of staff, as the amount of work will not be as great. In very small organisations you can get away without a group as all staff can be involved almost from the word go.

Where size dictates a formal group, it should include representatives from health and safety, HR and occupational health departments, trade unions, internal communications staff and general management. While stress at work is very much a health and safety issue, it is also a matter of concern for other disciplines, and research has shown that the most effective interventions result from HR, health and safety and occupational health staff working together.

The numbers game

It is a good idea to make the first task of the project group to check that the organisation starts collecting data (if it is not already doing so) that it can use later to measure the effectiveness of the stress initiative. Absence rates, productivity levels, and staff turnover data can all be used to show the impact of a positive attitude to staff wellbeing and to justify the time and expense of the initiative in the board room at a later date. But only if you are collecting the data before the programme starts.

The project group also needs to agree procedures for after the audit (these should be in place ideally before the risk assessment starts). For example, the group needs to decide where staff will be advised to go for support and advice if they have stress issues. They also may need to decide what support will be available for line managers if it will be their job to carry out the assessment. It may be helpful to produce a flowchart showing managers who they refer employees to for help if an employee's stress problem is not within their control, if the issue is personal rather than work-related, or if it needs more authority than they have to sanction extra time off for the employee.

Of course, to build an effective stress-management framework in advance of the audit, the project group will need training to understand stress and the issues outlined in the first article in this series (see Stress: breaking down the barriers), such as the barriers that stop people recognising and tackling their own stress issues.

Policy decisions

The project group should be responsible for overseeing a stress policy for the organisation. This can be a stand-alone document or integrated into other health and safety or wellbeing policies.

Either way, it should set out the organisation's commitment to stress management and explain the role of employees and managers. It should make clear that, under the Health and Safety at Work Act, all employees have a duty to ensure they do not harm themselves or others and explain what staff should do if they do have problems.

The stress policy should also explain the referral processes for employees suffering stress, where managers can go for advice, where they send their staff if they need help and where staff can go without referral.

This sounds like it needs a massive infrastructure, but in a small organisation it might be as simple as a statement that employees should talk to their immediate manager about unacceptable stress levels or to someone in the company nominated as the first port of call on wellbeing issues. Whoever this is, they will need sufficient training to deal with enquiries, but once they have been through the training they could act as the referral point for managers dealing with stress cases too. You can download a sample stress policy from the Health and Safety Executive's website at www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/pdfs/examplepolicy.pdf.

It is worth testing the policy in more than one department before launching it to the whole organisation. What the group believes will work in theory may not work in practice.

One local authority produced a very comprehensive policy that was commended for clarity by the local HSE inspector. But when it was presented to the occupational health team during staff training, they immediately pointed out  the team was not large enough to deal with the planned referral system. Unfortunately, the policy had already been distributed throughout the organisation.

Where resources allow, anyone likely to be involved in supporting managers through the risk assessment process and beyond (such as health and safety officers, HR managers, trade union reps and occupational health staff) should be trained. These staff can then also act as ambassadors and form a communication hierarchy to spread positive messages about the stress initiative. Throughout the process, effective communication is essential, so try to include whoever is in charge of communications. In small organisations, communication is much less of a problem, though the health and safety manager should not forget the importance of informing staff of procedures as they are developed.

Senior support

Before the risk assessment process begins, as with any project, it is extremely useful to get senior management involved. If senior managers are convinced of the need for stress intervention, the budget is likely to be more healthy. Top-level support also shows employees that stress is taken seriously.

Unfortunately, as we noted in Stress: breaking down the barriers, convincing senior managers is often hard as they don't know what they don't know. Which brings us back to the need for training again. As the top team often do not feel they have time for such matters, the best line of attack is to offer a short sharp awareness session. This session needs to drive home the rationale for risk assessment, the business case, and the legal duties. There is plenty of good case study material in the stress section of the HSE website on the benefits of effective stress management.

Making an awareness presentation to senior management squashed in between "more important" matters, trainers can find themselves told not to worry about the time, as managers begin to see the nature of the issue. Senior managers attending the stress training obviously demonstrates their commitment to the rest of the staff. Attendees at staff training will often ask if senior managers have been through it too.

A few years ago, I worked with two different police forces, one immediately after the other, training all managers from sergeant upwards in the major aspects of organisational stress. In one force, the chief constable insisted on understanding the programme first and spent half a day going though the training himself. He also insisted on the same training for his team and asked for a review half way through the programme. The senior team in the other force were not interested at all; they were far too important and busy. Guess which force had the lower absence rate and the more contented staff?

From the peak

As well as senior managers, a health and safety manager will also need support from the top. This can often be more of a challenge where the top team is just one or two people. If the managing director does not believe in stress, they have no colleagues to help change them change their mind. It may then be down to the health and safety practitioner to persuade them. In this case, you may find it useful to digest the information in Stress: breaking down the barriers, which covered ways to counter the myths and misunderstandings people commonly use as excuses to avoid action on stress. Sometimes, the wish to keep up with the Joneses may act in your favour - if you find a competitor is taking any steps to deal with stress, let the managing director know.

Finally, don't underestimate the importance of communication in your preparations. Tell staff that a formal risk assessment is going to take place and why.

If stress is seen as a rude word in the organisation, call it something else. Wellbeing is a perfectly acceptable substitute that carries no stigma. Any communication needs to emphasise the rationale for doing a risk assessment and what it will involve. It also needs to stress the necessity for everyone to participate and the fact that any participation will be treated in strictest confidence.

Once you have addressed these issues, you are ready to move to the risk assessment proper. The next article, Stress: the assessment stage will show you how to carry out an effective assessment.

This article draws on the booklet from the HSE and International Stress Management Association (ISMA) Making the Stress Management Standards Work - How to Apply the Standards in Your Workplace, available free from www.hsebooks.com or to download from www.isma.org.uk/stressatwork.pdf.

Dr Rosemary Anderson is a chartered psychologist and runs her own consultancy ApP. She specialises in all aspects of personal and organisational stress management. She has worked with the HSE on stress policy for three years.
www.andersonpeakperformance.co.uk

 

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