“Stress…stress…they don’t know the meaning of it. I’ll show them what stress is!”

It’s not unusual to hear comments like this in the workplace when a colleague is absent with a stress related illness. I’d hope my colleagues would be a bit more sympathetic if it was me off sick!

“Stress…stress…they don’t know the meaning of it. I’ll show them what stress is!”

It’s not unusual to hear comments like this in the workplace when a colleague is absent with a stress related illness. I’d hope my colleagues would be a bit more sympathetic if it was me off sick!

So what is work related stress? It is something that affects different people in different ways. The Health and Safety Executive define it as “ the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressure or other types of demand placed on them”. I would change that slightly by preceding the word “excessive” with “perceived”.

How do you define stress?

We all have differing levels of coping and tolerating work pressures. What is the norm to one person might be too much to cope with for another. Therefore there can’t be any standard levels of work which is relevant to everyone. However, there is plenty of advice available on line and the first place to go would be the HSE website.

HSE standards talk about 6 specific management standards:

• Demands – Includes issues like workload, work patterns and the work environment.
• Control – How much “say” the person has in the way they do their work.
• Support – Includes the encouragement, sponsorship and resources provided by the organisation, line management and colleagues.
• Relationships – Includes promoting positive working to avoid conflict and dealing with unacceptable behaviour.
• Role – Whether people understand their role within the organisation and whether the organisation ensures that they do not have conflicting roles.
• Change – How organisational change (large or small) is managed and communicated in the organisation.

Employers do have a duty of care towards staff but it shouldn’t be about ticking boxes once someone is suffering from a stress related absence. There should be an inbuilt desire in the culture of the organisation which is proactive in supporting staff. That could lead us on to all sorts of employee benefit initiatives which we can’t cover in this blog.

“It won’t happen to us” is not a stance employers should take. It can “happen” anywhere and the consequences of staff or ex staff making employment tribunal claims can be huge with awards well in to six figures.

The impact of stress in the workplace

By not addressing stress related issues, there is the inherent risk of sickness absence. These kind of absences tend to increase as the academic year progresses. This in turn means you may need to address unnecessary sickness absences through your absence management procedures so it is important to have robust procedures in place.

Reduce the impact of stress related absence

Our HR clients can access guidance on handling stress related absences from our experienced HR staff. The alternative is looking at areas to minimise absences before they happen. Again, we can advise on tools to do this including Stress Risk Assessments.

The widely acknowledged case that laid the way for big claims against employers where stress was a factor, was Walker v Northumberland County Council. Without going into great depth, Walker had two breakdowns due to “Stress at Work”.

It was deemed that the second one was foreseeable as the Council had promised support which was put into place but didn’t last long. The award against the Council was £175,000 and that was over twenty years ago. The costs now could be…..dread to think!

So watch out for signs of stress in colleagues or better still, do something before you get to that stage. Your HR department will be able to advise you further.