While stress risk assessing has been talked about for years, employers of late have been taking a much more proactive approach than ever before.
Jo Yarker, Managing Partner at Affinity Health at Work and Professor at Birbeck, University of London, who ran psychosocial risk assessments for Shell and AstraZeneca alongside her PhD nearly twenty years ago, points to several major turning points.
“Longterm sickness absence due to stress, depression and anxiety is at a record high. Employers are seeing the costs of unaddressed psychosocial risks through absence, presenteeism and turnover,” she says.
“There is also recognition that many wellbeing initiatives are not addressing the root causes of stress – we need to move away from a ‘sticking plaster’ approach to look at the way work is designed and managed, and to deliver on investment.”
Following Australia?
Another driver is that Australia updated its Work Health and Safety Regulations to include mandatory, regular psychosocial risk assessments, requiring employers to assess and control risks such as job demands, poor support and bullying – encouraging a more preventative, rather than reactive, approach to mental health.
“Even though Australia may be a long way physically from the UK, we are all more interconnected than ever due to social media, so its generating lots of interest” says Yarker.
Over stress awareness month (April), the HSE increasingly put out communications on good risk assessment practice and has been taking a more proactive approach itself recently. For instance, its probe into the University of Birmingham, following claims that employees are experiencing preventable workplace stress, has caused a stir.
University of Birmingham HSE stress probe
For a long time, there has been recognition that organisations should be assessing and should be taking action – to address both physical and psychosocial risks. But many employers don’t know their obligations when it comes to psychosocial risk, and enforcement in this area has often been viewed as challenging. The fact that it is doing this with Birmingham University is a visible act of enforcement. So if the HSE is prepared to do this for this organisation, how many others could it launch official investigations for?
Certainly, we at Make a Difference Media have heard many an employer doubting the HSE’s ‘teeth’ and its commitment to enforcing rules – this news could put paid to that. One challenge we’ve heard from employers has been knowing clearly what actions should be taken to make a change.
As Yarker says:
“If you’ve got asbestos on your roof, the evidence-based action is very clear. But for psychosocial hazards, the interventions are varied and depend on context, situation and budget, etc. This makes it more difficult to set expectations or advise one-size-fits-all approach.”
A shift is needed
As these types of interventions are often owned and led by HR and/or the senior management team, and are related to overarching business strategy, they require different skills from professionals.
“There’s a real shift needed for professionals in this space – it requires a partnership approach, working with new parts of the organisation, those that are relevant to things like job redesign or career progression, for example,” says Yarker.
For all these reasons, HSE has commissioned Affinity Health at Work, Institute of Occupational Medicine, Institute of Employment Studies and the Society of Occupational Medicine to create Project Oscar which is looking at the most effective ways to mitigate risk in different situations. (Affinity Health at Work is running another consultation later this year and welcomes input from all employers, see here).
Catalogue of interventions
The end vision is to create a “catalogue of interventions” to be used to prevent work related stress which are based on evidence. This should be a powerful tool in the industry’s fight against the perception that Health and Wellbeing is not evidence-based enough and associated with disparate, peripheral interventions that are not known to be effective.
“The challenge in the wellbeing space to date has been that the intervention isn’t always matched to the outcome that the employer wants to achieve,” says Yarker.
This is exactly what one engineering consultancy, Mott Macdonald, found. It started running wellbeing activity in 2015 but, at this time, “it was about support and awareness and we had many initiatives going on run by local employees, but little strategy and we didn’t know if the spend was actually benefiting our organisation,” says Dr Laura Hague, Group Safety Manager at Mott Macdonald, who oversees the firm’s global programme.
Adding Wellbeing to Safety
Hague comes from a traditional Health and Safety background and, so, when Wellbeing was added to the function she spearheaded centralising all activity and asking the question: what are we looking to achieve?
“Health and Safety is about trying to get to the root cause of symptoms. So if we don’t understand why something’s happened, it’s really hard to say ‘this is what we’re going to do to prevent it happening again’,” she says.
Consequently, Mott Macdonald has been focusing on really understanding the issues its employees face from a psychosocial perspective. It’s done this through data gathering via surveys and listening to its people to understand the story beneath the numbers: if people have taken time off work why has this been?
What are the root causes of stress?
“If you look at days lost due to health and safety accidents versus days lost due to work related ill health, the latter is far bigger; most of it is psychological/ psychosocial in nature,” says Hague.
Now there’s a protocol where the employer asks: how can we prevent this happening again? What steps can we take? What were the risks and what controls are we going to now put in place?
As part of Mott Macdonald’s mission to give back to the industry, Hague has led the creation of an industry guide to help organisations balance commercial and people focussed priorities. (For more info, see “Managing wellbeing risk: A Practical Guide for the Engineering Consultancy Sector”.)
We need specifics
Hague advocates, like Yarker, that we need, as an industry, to work towards specifics.
“A lot of the time, wellbeing interventions can be very generic and broad and it can be difficult to work out ‘how is that going to help the individuals on this project?’” she says.
She suggests coming back to the management standards, and clarity about role and scope, is helpful as is “agreeing with our clients about acceptable behaviour and what we will do, and how we might escalate things, if there are relationship issues on a project”.
Management standards are a strong foundation
With over 30 years of experience in the industry, Carole Spiers, Founder of the International Stress Management Association, has seen the landscape of Workplace Wellbeing evolve significantly. Yet despite these changes, she maintains that the management standards remain a strong foundation—even if they’re no longer new.
“I know the standards are quite old now, but they will still hold you in a good state,” she says.
She highlights the ongoing relevance of being alert to key risk areas such as excessive workload, role ambiguity, and unrealistic expectations.
Subjective nature of stress
One of the greatest challenges, she believes, is the subjective nature of stress in the workplace.
“Some people will perceive a situation as ‘pressure’, while others will experience it as ‘stress’,” she explains. “So how do you assess that risk? It’s not easy—and, for me, you can only do it effectively by making time to talk to your people.”
And that, she says, is where organisations often fall short.
“Employers and line managers frequently say, ‘But we haven’t got time’. Yet the truth is—you can’t afford not to make time. If you want to reduce stress and protect the wellbeing of your people, those conversations are essential. You have to manage that stress. Unless we carve out time then, whether stress appears on your risk assessment or not, makes no difference.”
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