Employee Risk Management Consultants

Specialists in:  Audit and Risk Assessment for Stress, Diversity, Sickness & Absenteeism

                           Employee Relations, Learning, Development and Motivation

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‘To Do’ Checklist

The following is what we consider to be a simple stress risk management checklist. It provides guidance on what you should be doing to meet your legal duties with regard to stress as a health and safety hazard and gives suggestions as to how you could be managing stress within your workplace.

Remember - stress is the point at which excessive pressure causes physical or mental harm. Excessive pressure can be due to intensity, duration or lack of capability. Normal pressure is fine and can be considered as beneficial.

 

Tasks to be completed

• Proactively identify stress hazards
  You should be looking at existing known stress hazards (reactive) and looking at what stress hazards could occur in the future (proactive)
• Determine who could be harmed by these stress hazards
  This includes employees, contractors and anyone else who could be affected by your work operations
• Assess the risk from identified stress hazards
  Like other health and safety risk assessments you will need to decide what level of risk exists because of these hazards, HSE levels are normally High, Medium, Low medium and Low Risk.
• Determine what risk minimisation is already in place
  Most organisation will already be minimising stress risk in some form or other, so this should be recorded, however is this enough?
• Implement additional stress risk minimisation as necessary
  Your intention is always to minimise stress risk to ‘low risk’. This should be done on a continuous improvement basis and carefully monitored to ensure that it is effective. You might for example consider:
• Training    
  - to maximise employee ability to cope
  - to increase manager abilities to lead teams without causing stress
  - to ensure all employees have skills necessary for the duties expected of them
  - to ensure that managers have skills to recognise and cope with stressed staff
• Clinics      
  - to manage individual health issues such as sleep, anxiety, anger, etc
  - to increase individual responsibility for personal stress management
• Mentoring
  - to help an individual cope with demands and expectation
  - to help an individual increase their capability
• Facilities   
  - to reduce environmental stress
  - to avoid situational stress
  - to enable individuals to reduce their pressure by rest and relaxation
• Team development
  - to improve manager / team relationships
  - create a better understanding of individual needs and strengths
• Organisation
  - to improve communication
  - to improve documentation, policies, procedures
• Ensure ‘reactive’ measures are in place
  Stress happens! You should ensure that you have ‘first aid’ measures in place to respond immediately to stress incidents to minimise effects of stress exposure.
• Monitor and review
  You must ensure that whatever stress risk minimisation initiatives you implement that you also establish how you are going to monitor and measure the success or failure of the initiative. Results must be reviewed on a regular basis and adjustment made accordingly. The HSE suggests the use of Focus Groups to maximise employee involvement.

 

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