This guide has been developed to help you understand the stress risk assessment process, and provide you with practical advice and tools to enable you to complete the task simply and cost-effectively. This is a ‘how-to', practical guide and not designed to provide exhaustive background.

Why Assess Stress Risks

Stress risk assessment is a process with a number of stages that has the ultimate aim of preventing and/or reducing stress at work so that the risk to the health and well-being of employees is minimised. This is good for business as costs associated with stress are reduced, and good for employees as they are happier and healthier.

We will start with some introductory comments and explanations of key concepts and terms. The rest of this concise guide will describe the process of stress risk assessment.

Introduction

Although, as the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) have stated, stress should be treated in the same way as any other health hazard, there are challenges you don't have with ‘physical' hazards. Stress is not like a hole in the ground, or a hazardous substance, it depends much more upon subjective perceptions, on how people see the situation they are in.

Therefore, the risk assessment must include a stage where you gather the views of employees. Without that, the stress risk assessment would be invalid, and not acceptable to HSE in compliance terms.

The simplest and most efficient way of gathering views is by means of a survey. In this guide we recommend using a particular form of survey based upon HSE's Management Standards. The Management Standards break stress hazards down into 6 categories.

Click here to download our full Stress Risk Assessment Guide

Point of clarification!
Please note that the survey is not the stress risk assessment. The survey is the part of the stress risk assessment process where you systematically gather the views of employees and analyse the results in a structured way.

If you would like to discuss how we could help in any of these areas please don't hesitate to contact Alastair Taylor on tel: 0131 476 5027 or e-mail: alastair@in-equilibrium.co.uk