Stress & Your Company
The following information is a general overview and a quick guide about what the Law says as a recommendation for you and your business in relation to Stress and Stress Management. It isn’t a definitive guide as the literature to support this information is quite lengthy and to do justice to it all the Health and Safety Executive on www.hse.gov.uk do a great job but to save you looking at such a wealth of information when some key points would tell you exactly what you need to know, here is the short guide: -
The Law & Stress:
In recent years the Government has paid more attention to how much stress costs British Industry. They access this information by following how much we pay in sickness absence; temporary replacement of sick staff, and full-time recruitment costs when the company is able to replace an employee who leaves or has proved unsuitable. The cost of this has risen considerably in recent years as have the number of people reporting depression and other mental health symptoms such as anxiety. It is this combination of factors that has alerted the Government and the Health & Safety Executive so that a greater understanding of stress exists; more tools are being developed to assess it, and laws have been passed to protect employees.
The Health and Safety Executive publish a number of statistics related to work stress as does the International Stress Management Association (ISMA) both of which you’ll find links for at the end of this guide. For the purposes of information here though the relevant statistics that support why you should look at stress are because it costs your bottom line.
The Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health suggests that the proportion of sickness absence that can be attributable to mental health could be as high as 44% and survey data from the CIPD and the CBI suggest that a ‘broad average’ sickness rate is around 7 days per employee per year. They also report that the estimated cost of sickness absence in 2006 was £20.2 billion therefore if we apply the ratio of the above statistic that 40 to 44% of this is related to mental health then the cost of mental health becomes £8.8 million. The CIPD calculate that this costs an average of £659 per employee per year although absence costs clearly vary across sectors and according to how much data of sickness absence is kept or maintained. Breaking this down still further being conservative and estimating that 10 to 20% of this cost could be attributable to work related causes of stress or mental health then sickness absence costs employers between £800 million and £1.6 billion a year.
What we recommend: -
Recent legislation has therefore supported the research in to a number of tools to help. Firstly there are ways of determining how many of your employees might experience stress given the circumstances or context that they work in within your company. This is called risk assessment and involves a set of management standards for stress. For a full breakdown of these standards go to http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards
but essentially they describe six broad risk factors which you will need to know about and look at within your workplace. These are: what demands are made on the employee; how much does an individual feel in control of the work they do and what happens to them. How much support do they get within that role; what are their relationships like, and how much conflict do they have to deal with? What is involved within their role and how much change does the organisation go through that affects the individual employee. A questionnaire that will help you ask relevant questions to assess these six areas is available from the HSE website following this link www.hse.gov.uk/stress/pdfs/teamquestionnaire.doc.
Also you can see how to apply the management standards http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/stresspk.htm
In a nutshell then to conduct a risk assessment,
Step 1: Look at the hazards
Step 2: Decide who might be harmed and how
Step 3: Evaluate the risks and decide whether the existing precautions are adequate
or whether more should be done.
Step 4: Record your findings
Step 5: Review your assessment and revise it if necessary.
A Policy on Stress
Next is the ruling that all organisations with more than 5 employees must have a policy on stress. This document is a short statement that you would include in your employee handbook and therefore needs to be available to all new employees when they are recruited and all current employees by sending out a copy once completed. Guidelines about what the policy might contain and how to write one are available here: http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/pdfs/examplepolicy.pdf
We also have a policy that is actually in use by an organisation but their name is protected for you to download here. This will save you writing a brand new one from scratch and hopefully enable you to introduce a policy document in to your company fairly quickly although on its own it will do little to prevent stress because your Managers may not be well educated about how to handle people experiencing mental health difficulties. Another useful document therefore is available from the HSE site called a ‘practical guide to managing and supporting people with mental health problems in the workplace’. It’s a very useful document that will tell you all you need to know about how to support people.
http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/pdfs/manage-mental-health.pdf
Essentially, a stress policy refers to the fact that your company accepts stress exists; that it can be debilitating, it defines a strategy or process to follow whereby if an employee finds they are experiencing stress they first ask to see their Manager and ask for support. At this stage a simple record of what was discussed, when and any actions that come out of that meeting is essential both to safeguard the employee, act as a reference for the future and will help you should you ever need to determine who is liable in the eventuality that an individual brings a case for unfair dismissal. Should your Manager feel unable to help due to their lack of experience of the problem at hand, the organisation undertakes to support the individual with the next stage of recommended action. That might be to take the problem with the Manager’s knowledge to Human Resources if you have a department, Occupational Health if that is more appropriate or escalate it up to the Chief Executive if the company is small and a decision needs to be sanctioned by him/ her to release the employee for a period of time. The other consideration you might wish to make and that needs to be explicitly stated in the policy is how much help, and what type of help, the organisation is willing to offer. Research now supports the belief that people can sit on NHS waiting lists for counselling support for upwards of a year which when you consider how unhappy they might be will simply contribute to the escalation of their difficulties and might mean they’ll go off sick as a result because they’ll feel unable to work. It’s quite possible therefore that it’s in your vested interest to apportion a small amount of funds in the eventuality that talking therapy or counselling (most often offered in the form of cognitive behavioural therapy now), is available locally to you and will help your employee not only take the minimum time off work but still be reasonably effective during this difficult stage of their lives. Similarly a financial advisor or Solicitor may be more appropriate depending on the nature of the problem they bring to you but if it helps to speed up their recovery or support with the problem they have, it could be very worthwhile.
You can expect to pay approx £100/ hour for a specialist and allowing a budget of £300 per person therefore in the eventuality that counselling support might be offered and they would be willing to accept it, means that they are given 3 sessions at your cost but it might mean they don’t take time off for long or go off long term sick. Sickness benefit costs are greater than counselling support and work by Price Waterhouse Coopers commissioned by the Health Work Wellbeing Executive (2008), indicated that ‘workplace wellness makes commercial success’. They also found that there is a ‘positive link between implementing wellness programmes and improved key performance indicators that programme costs can quickly be translated in to financial benefits”.
Finding a Specialist:
There are several ways to find some help in the form of counselling support. The first is to approach your local GP practice and determine if they have a recommended list of practitioners in your area. If they do, it is worth approaching one of them to find out how much they charge and whether they visit the site or see individuals off site. Set up a working relationship that means that the practitioner will be your resource in the eventuality that someone needs counselling support and make sure your Managers know about the telephone number/ face to face contact an employee can have. It would be helpful if a centralised function within your business kept confidential records of who is seen and how often but due to the data protection act this information must be protected and kept in a safe place.
The second way is to use the Directory of Chartered Psychologists, a purple reference book available in your local library that documents every practitioner in your geographical area with experience of this sort. If you are unhappy about using a specialist you have no track record with then please contact us using the contact form on this site and we offer a free service to identify a counselling practitioner for you that you can approach. These individuals will be highly qualified and more than likely known to us as we have a database of people we have referred work to from all over the country. Alternatively all the sites where counsellors and Psychologists are listed are available in the ‘useful links’ section on this site.
The third way is to offer a service that you pay for every year but that individuals access on a bespoke basis as and when they need. Called an Employee Assistance Programme several well known organisations offer this service and it ranges in cost from a telephone counselling service to a face to face consultation to off-site counselling. Two organisations worth approaching for this are as follows: -
Ceridian: Telephone: 0800 0482 737 or www.ceridian.co.uk
First Assist: Telephone: 08000 721 197 or www.first-assist.com
What Your Managers Need to Know: -
Once you have decided on a stress policy and your Human Resources department has integrated it in to your work practice, it is important for you to disseminate it in a logical way so that your organisation is seen to be accepting the existence of stress and appropriately giving permission for people to discuss it. Highly technical environments may not routinely be used to dealing with stress in their workplace in comparison with a people oriented customer services environment so the culture in which you work makes a lot of difference to the general skill level of people involved in dealing with sensitive issues. It can therefore be essential to train your Managers (depending on their existing competency with people), so that they know you have a policy in place and so that they deal sensitively with anyone experiencing mental health or stress difficulties. They then need training in how to recognise stress symptoms so that they can approach someone whom they think is experiencing unacceptable signs of stress, and/ or tackle an individual helpfully and appropriately if the employee brought an issue to them.
The best way to achieve this is to contact us and discuss it via the contact form on the site. We can guide and assist you with what you need and who you might contact. If you prefer a quick guide for what to do please follow this is as follows:
The individual reports their Stress to their Manager
The Manager &/ or HR records this meeting in written form
(dates the document and writes down what the issues are and the agreed actions)
The individual tries to |
The company tries to help & support them |
A follow up meeting is held during which the actions are discussed
hopefully with a favourable outcome
If not and the individual goes off sick, evoke your Sickness absence policy and start the procedure for statutory Sick pay. After 6 weeks utilise the services of a Clinical Psychologist whom you can find with the help of this site or the link for BACUP (the British Association for Counselling) and have the individual assessed to encourage them to return to work |
Stay in touch with them whilst absent so that they feel important to you |
If you have any difficulties with an employee please contact us
and we will try to support you.
Stress Information for Executives
Sue is founder of www.sue-firth.com and you can contact her by
e-mailing : sue@sue-firth.com
or calling : 0844 800 4292
