Original Riches

There are clearly ‘bottom-line’ reasons why you should seriously consider the well-being of your employees, because satisfied and committed employees offer superior customer/client service and are the engine of success; however, there are there legal reasons. There are positive and negative sides of health and safety at work to be considered. On the negative side is the threat of legal action if the law is violated, and the fear that disgruntled employees will use this legislation to tarnish the image of the organization. However, there’s also a very positive side to dealing with health and safety issues head-on: if adequate policies and procedures are put in place then there is a much reduced risk of legislation, and policies/procedures take the steam out of any employee’s claim that they were put at unnecessary risk in the workplace.

In order to ensure that you comply with health and safety legislation, it is vital that all staff are educated and made aware of what is required of them – these matters do not belong only to the Health and Safety Manager!

Stress in the Workplace

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) defines stress as,

“An adverse reaction a person has to excessive pressure or other types of demands placed upon them.’

The HSE states that employers have a responsibility to help reduce stress which may arise in their employees as a result of their work. That is, employers have a legal duty of care to ensure that their employees are not harmed by work-related stress.

One of the major reasons why stress policies and procedures are not effective, according to HSE is,

“If the project group making the decisions do not understand stress and the issues involved”.

What are the Legal Duties?

Organisations must adhere to statutory regulation concerning health and safety in the workplace; and line managers are required to understand these requirements, especially in relation to stress and unacceptable working practices. Therefore, it is essential to have clearly formulated Health and Safety policies, as well as effective plans for their implementation.

UK employers have a statutory duty to assess the risk of workplace stress to their employees. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) publish guidelines for organisations to implement, but putting these elements into practice can be difficult. (We provide summaries of HSE documents on our website, Psychology4biz.com.)

The first step is to undertake a risk assessment, which sets out the foreseen hazards. In addition to appointing competent people to implement the health and safety measures identified by the risk assessment, it is vital that clear information and training is provided to employees.

But What in Practice Must I do?

The objective of stress management is not to eliminate stress, but rather to control its damaging aspects. After all, a certain amount of stress is both inevitable and, even, desirable – in HSE terms, this is defined as normal work-related pressure. Damaging pressure (i.e., stress) consists of working conditions (e.g., high work load) that employees feel they are unable to control. Some employees can handle very high work loads because they feel in control of their work and, therefore, are not ‘stress-out’; rather, they are rather ‘highly motivated’. The central role of psychological control is fundamental subjective, and once again it depends, to a large extent, on the well-being of the individual. Low well-being leads to feels of being out of control at work levels that are much lower than individuals with high well-being.

Wellbeing and Resilence

Management have a statutory responsibility for supporting their employee in a manner that promotes resilience when work load increases. However, employees also need to know how they should handle stress — they need to be given the tools to recognize the sources of stress and how to avoid its negative consequences. Once again, it comes down to education and knowledge. All too often work pressure comes ‘out of the blue’ (which adds to people feeling they are out of control), but usually, although not always, this is because there has been inadequate planning.

Providing employees with knowledge about the causes and effects of stress is vital. When combined with good working conditions, employees are then be required to manage the degree of pressure they can tolerate and to ask for additional support when they feel their workload is exceeding their ability to cope. It’s not just about management ‘making it easy’ for employees; in the eyes of the HSE, employees too have to take responsibility, but they can only do this after they have been educated about the work-related pressure and stress.

Human Resources, Stress and Organizational Success

Research shows that, unfortunately in the UK, Human Resources is still not seen as a force for strategetic change within organizations – although, more enlighthened organsiations are starting to recognize this reality. For example, there is an impressive array of organizational-level outcomes that HR Directors strongly influence, including: delivering customer satisfaction, attraction and retention of the best talent, reduced absenteeism and organisational citizenship.

The Occupational Health, or Health and Safety, office or manager may be responsible for meeting statutory HSE guidelines on stress, but they will not normally be also responsible for customer/client service, etc. However, an integrated approach is needed to ensure that all the organisational goals are met by properly managing employees. Such research goes to underscore the fundamental importance placed on well-being in achieving a wide range of organizational goals.

Tackling Stress Before it’s too Late: How to Stop the Horse Bolting

According to Personal Today, most employers focus on helping employees who have suffered stress-related ill health to return to work rather than tackling its causes in the first place. A sobering thought is that, each year, nearly 13 million working days are lost to stress-related ill health, at a cost estimated by the Health and Safety Executive to be nearly 10 billon every year. This is a terrible waste of resources, and usually a very ineffective way to deal with workplace stress.

The fact is that much of this stress-related illness could be avoided. For example, the Employment Review suggests that early interventions designed to prevent stress-related illness can be as simple as providing information leaflets.

Some form of counselling is typically provided to employees returning to work after a stress-related absence. The reliance on techniques such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is backed by evidence of clinical effectiveness. One 2006 study by the London School of Economics claimed a £750 course of CBT was both cheaper and more effective than drug-based solutions.

Today, there are available very cost-effective online CBT programs that nip in the bud early signs of stress, and can be used to treat more advanced cases. These programs are starting to revolutionalise the CBT field for the following reasons. It can take many months before the first session with a face-to-face CBT therapist. During this time, the employee may have been off sick for many months, resulting in lost productivity. The longer the employee is off work the less chance there is that they will return to work, which incurs further costs in terms of subsequent recruitment. There’s also the real risk that the employee will commence a legal action against their employer. Even if this action is unjustified, considerable organisational resources, in terms of time and money, will need to be devoted to defend the claim.

Wellbeing is the key to so many organisation
al outcomes and personal health and happiness. Therefore, dealing with stress in the workplace is not only about the need for employers to meet their statutory responsibilities, but it is also about making high-performing, successful organisations that are sustainable and where talented people want to work and where they thrive.

For these reasons, we established Psychology4biz.com to help organisations apply psychology to maximise the their potential of their people for superior organisational success.  

 

Professor Philip Corr

Dr Giles Burch

Psychology For You Limited

 

Psychology4biz.com

 

Dr Philip Corr is Professor of Psychology at Swansea University, UK, and is an international authority on emotion, motivation, personality and psychopathology.

Dr Giles Burch is Senior Lecturer in business psychology at Auckland University, NZ, and an expert on the application of psychology to the workplace.