Prevention

Proactive Prevention

Health and Safety Executive Guidance on WRS

May 1995 - The Health Safety Executive (HSE) published guidance on stress at work. Stress is recognised as a workplace hazard that is both predictable and preventable.

June 2001 - The HSE published important guidance on the management of stress, called 'Tackling Work-related Stress: A Manager's Guide to Improving and Maintaining Employee Health and Wellbeing'.

This document sets out explicitly the incidence of WRS as well as the duties of employers to risk assess stress and act on their findings. The costs (legal, ethical and economic) of failing to act are highlighted.

If employers successfully tackle workplace stress the HSE has noted that they enjoy: a healthier workforce, lower sickness absence, better performance and improved service, less frequent and less severe accidents, better relationships between colleagues and with 'clients', and a lower staff turnover. Action on stress is therefore a very cost effective investment!

Basically, there is nothing special about stress that makes it different from other hazards. It must be identified, and then removed or controlled in order to ensure a safe workplace. If stress is a potential hazard it should be identified in risk assessments in the same way as physical hazards such as dangerous chemicals or fire risks.

You can assist stressed colleagues by being a 'caring colleague' who notices the external signs of depression, anxiety, etc. and urges them to take appropriate action.

To help secure your future work / life balance and positively enhance that of your colleagues, you could go to your union representative on your school's 'Health and Safety Committee' and suggest that an initiative such as the 'Work Positive' initiative be followed.

The Work Positive initiative helps to identify the potential causes of stress at work using a risk assessment questionnaire and detailed instructions. The 'action pack' also provides a CD for the analysis and presentation of the results. The information derived from the initiative would be used to target and reduce the main areas contributing to WRS in your workplace.

The Work Positive action pack can be obtained free of charge (one pack) from this excellent website.

The success of any WRS reduction project can be quantified via the analysis of staff absence records taken after full implementation of the findings derived from questionnaires, etc.

If for any reason your school does not yet have a WRS policy then the next logical step would be for your school 'H&S Committee' to write one based on the results of the Work Positive initiative and the 'HSE' guidance materials from their website.

What should a good School WRS policy contain?

For a school WRS policy to be effective it must:

recognise that stress is a health and safety issue,
recognise that much stress is caused by work,
be jointly developed and agreed with the respective unions,
provide for joint monitoring and regular reviews to assess and feedback its effectiveness,
have full commitment from the Senior Management Team,
guarantee a 'blame free' approach,
apply to everyone, and
its implementation should be based on the outcome of risk assessments.

The objectives of the policy should be:

to prevent WRS by identifying the causes and eliminating them as far as practicable,
to recognise and deal with WRS related problems as they arise,
to change the workplace climate to encourage more openness about this extremely important issue, and
to rehabilitate employees suffering from WRS though the provision of independent counselling and changing their workload or working environment following specific risk assessment of their duties.