MANAGING STRESS STRATEGICALLY: TURNING AWARENESS INTO ACTION
The theme of this year’s National Stress Awareness Day is “Optimising Employee Wellbeing Through Strategic Stress Management.”
But how do you manage stress when it’s so… intangible? So individual and subjective?
Helpfully, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has well-established and practical guidance available for employers on managing stress, which can be found here.
This guidance sets out the ‘Management Standards’ approach to addressing the causes of work-related stress. The Standards identify six key areas of work that can lead to stress if not properly managed:
Demands – workload and the pressure placed on individuals
Control – the extent to which individuals have control over their work
Support – the resources and encouragement available to individuals
Relationships – the quality of relationships within the work environment
Role – clarity and understanding of individual roles within the organisation
Change – how organisational change is managed and communicated
The HSE advises employers to assess the risks in each of these six areas and act on those risks in conjunction with employees.
But how do you actually risk assess and address any imbalance in these areas?
Alongside example risk assessments, the HSE has developed user-friendly ‘Talking Toolkits’ to assist managers in having open and honest conversations with their teams about these issues — Stress Talking Toolkits - HSE. They recommend building these discussions into existing one-to-ones, employee training, or weekly catch-ups.
Importantly, the guidance makes it clear that line managers should listen to what is being said, rather than offering excuses or explanations, and then agree action points and solutions together.
This year’s theme highlights the importance of addressing stress not just at an individual level, but through systemic, workplace-wide initiatives. It reflects the legal duty on employers to assess and act on the risk of stress in the same way as any other work-related health and safety risk.
Ultimately, this requires carving out time in the busy working day for reflection, planning, and genuine conversation — but those moments may be exactly what prevent “good pressure” from tipping into stress, and could be the key to a happier, healthier, and more productive workforce.
