How do you carry out a Stress Risk Assessment?
The first and most important way to answer this question is to point out that Stress Risk Assessment is a process (see What is a Stress Risk Assessment?), so there isn’t one type of activity but several. So lets look at the steps in the process and the kind of tasks you will need to undertake.
Before you get started, there are some important considerations:
Step 1 – Identify the hazards
Our advice would be to use the Management Standards as a framework. The Standards show what the potential hazards are in a sensible, straightforward way. If you use that framework and approach, you are going to be doing your best to meet your legal obligations. So, no need to re-invent the wheel.
There may however be sector-specific stress issues that you want to look at. If that's the case, it’s a good idea to think carefully at the outset what those issues are and how you will gather data about them. In practice, this is about coming up with the right questions to ask employees at step 2. It’s also important to be careful to ask the questions in the right way. It can help to get the advice of someone skilled in question and survey construction to help if you have concerns.
Step 2 – Decide who might be harmed and how
This step is generally about consulting employees and gathering data. This is where a survey can be very helpful as it’s generally the most cost-effective way of gathering the data you need for analysis.
If you are going to use a stress survey or questionnaire you need to consider:
What survey tool or questionnaire should you use? You could use HSE’s own stress tool or the tool provided by your consultants. If you do use another tool, make sure it asks sufficient questions on the main causes of work related stress. Otherwise, the survey tool will not be fit for purpose. A good commercial stress survey tool would normally include the HSE stress questions.
How are you going to make sure all staff are consulted and have a chance to give their views? This is critically important. Be aware of the need of groups such as remote workers or shift workers who can easily be missed out. Make sure you take steps so that all staff groups have an equal opportunity to take part. If some groups feel they were not involved or consulted, they will feel ignored and this can cause bad feeling and mistrust.
Will you carry out the survey yourself or use consultants? There are pros and cons of using consultants for Stress Risk Assessment. It can seem cheaper to do it yourself, but you need to take into account the time and manpower required and that consultants have streamlined processes and technology to do this task. The most important consideration is perhaps the issue of independence. If you do it yourself, will your workforce will be cynical or suspicious about the process? A major benefit of using external expertise / consultants is their perceived independence.
How are you going to categorise the workforce for the purpose of benchmarking and comparative analysis? This is a very important aspect to consider. Best practice guidelines such as those from the British Psychological Society advise that results should only be fed back for groups with more than 10 respondents, so original group sizes should ideally be 25 or more to allow for lower response rates. In larger organizations there can be a number of useful breakdowns you could consider e.g. Main occupational role, department, location. It’s worth thinking about this carefully and discussing this with your consultants if you use them. It’s important also to be clear about how employees would label or categorise themselves, so that when they come to do the survey, they will easily assign themselves to the correct category.
How will you safeguard anonymity and confidentiality? This is vital because if people feel they can be identified, it will affect the way they answer, invalidating the results of any survey. There are a number of ways to improve perceptions of anonymity such as:
How are the results going to be communicated to managers and staff? This needs to be considered early on, as consulting on the results is a key part of the process. This is as much about communications strategy and managing expectations as it is about the actual dissemination of results. Managers and staff need to have confidence in the process and that they will be made aware of the results. They also need to know how they will be made aware, when, and what will happen after the results are published. Then once the survey is complete, you need to make sure you do things in exactly the way you said you were going to. Being consistent in this way breeds confidence. Because of this, the next survey will be much easier and you will see a substantial lowering of cynicism and a rise in response rates.
Are there alternatives to using a survey? The short answer can be 'yes' in certain circumstances and indeed alternatives might be better for much smaller organizations and groups. But you need to make sure that if you do use other methods such as focus groups that your Stress Risk Assessment is suitable and sufficient. For example, it is much easier to gather data efficiently and give everyone the opportunity to give their views if you’re
using a survey. It can be difficult or very expensive, or both, with other methods. If you need to gather the views of a substantial number of people, the best advice is to use a survey.
Step 3 – Evaluate the risks and decide on precautions
This step is about analysing and interpreting your results. If yours is a smaller organization, this may simply be looking at all your employees as one group and seeing how the results compare to national benchmark data. You should be able to see quickly where your organization’s stress management performance is good and where improvements can be made. If you are doing this yourself and using something like HSE’s Stress Indicator and Analysis Tool, the results are colour-coded so you can prioritise and see which types of work related stress hazard require to be addressed most urgently.
If yours is a larger organization, the analysis inevitably becomes more complex because you normally would be benchmarking both your organizational results and comparing results between staff group categories across the organization. Both types of analysis and benchmarking are important because the results often highlight both organizational stress issues (for example related to the culture of the organization) and local stress issues in particular areas that need to be addressed.
Often the internal comparisons (e.g. between departments) are the most interesting and useful. Although comparing your organization's results against national standards is useful, care needs to be taken interpreting the results because you are never really comparing like with like. However, internal comparisons (e.g. by department) within the same organization can be very revealing, highlighting hot-spots where there may be a number of stress problems and areas of excellence where stress risk is low and the quality of working life is high.
Analysis and interpretation can be somewhat problematic if done internally by a manager. If someone internal does do the analysis, they would need to be seen as having sufficient expertise and be sufficiently independent in order to avoid problems such as mistrust and cynicism about the results. This is often why many organizations use consultants.
Generally, survey data, which is quantitative in nature, is easier to analyse and interpret than qualitative data from other sources such as focus groups and interviews. It’s also far cheaper!
Ultimately, whatever methods you employ the kinds of questions you are looking to answer are the same, for example:
Step 4 – Record your findings and implement them.
By now, you should have a good and comprehensive analysis of the data gathered. If you have used consultants, they should have produced a report providing organizational analysis and comparative analyses from departmental results.
This stage in a Stress Risk Assessment process is not just about recording but about reporting results. It’s a vital stage. You should have made it clear to managers and staff before the process started how results were going to be reported. Now it’s a matter of doing exactly what you said you would do. If you don’t, the whole process can backfire. Staff will wonder what you have to hide and jump to (usually negative) conclusions. On the other hand if you do exactly what you said you would in a timely manner, the whole
process will be viewed by staff in a positive way.
The best advice is to be open but concise with your feedback. Stick to the key results and conclusions. Your consultants may be able to provide departmental reports for managers and staff in each department that show in summary form how the department compares to others, and what the key issues are for that department. Another part of this stage is to develop and implement action plans. There are two aspects to this, organizational planning and local planning.
Organizational results need to be discussed at a senior level. If you have a stress management or well-being steering group in your organization, they will normally be involved in this too and may report back to the board or senior management team. You will need to make some decisions about organizational priorities for action. These may be general actions you judge will improve stress management performance right across the organization, such as policy development, culture change, management training and improved, more responsive support structures.
For local action planning, it is critically important to involve local managers and staff teams. They need to take ownership of their results and develop and implement their own plans. This has three important benefits: firstly this gives local management and staff teams a greater sense of involvement and control; secondly, this makes it more likely plans will be practicable, and; thirdly, it is far more likely that implemented plans will be effective.
Consultants are sometimes used to provide support with facilitation of action planning and with more often with training for managers in managing stress risks at work.
Step 5 – Review your assessment and update if necessary.
This final step is really about evaluating what has been done and deciding if it has been effective in preventing and reducing stress at both organizational and local levels. Typically, some actions have been more effective than others in reducing the risk of stress. Sometimes major organizational changes occur that have an impact on staff after the implementation of action plans and that needs to be taken into account when evaluating and reviewing what has been done. It's important that local managers and teams are involved in this stage. Although it is good for someone (or a steering group) to oversee the evaluation process, local managers and staff need to be given some responsibility for evaluating their own action plans and making changes if necessary.
Before you get started, there are some important considerations:
- Do you have senior management commitment to the process? (See ‘How can you get commitment of senior managers to Stress Risk Assessment?')
- Do managers and employees understand what is going to happen and when? (See the section on communications strategy in ‘What factors increase the effectiveness of Stress Risk Assessment?')
Step 1 – Identify the hazards
Our advice would be to use the Management Standards as a framework. The Standards show what the potential hazards are in a sensible, straightforward way. If you use that framework and approach, you are going to be doing your best to meet your legal obligations. So, no need to re-invent the wheel.
There may however be sector-specific stress issues that you want to look at. If that's the case, it’s a good idea to think carefully at the outset what those issues are and how you will gather data about them. In practice, this is about coming up with the right questions to ask employees at step 2. It’s also important to be careful to ask the questions in the right way. It can help to get the advice of someone skilled in question and survey construction to help if you have concerns.
Step 2 – Decide who might be harmed and how
This step is generally about consulting employees and gathering data. This is where a survey can be very helpful as it’s generally the most cost-effective way of gathering the data you need for analysis.
If you are going to use a stress survey or questionnaire you need to consider:
What survey tool or questionnaire should you use? You could use HSE’s own stress tool or the tool provided by your consultants. If you do use another tool, make sure it asks sufficient questions on the main causes of work related stress. Otherwise, the survey tool will not be fit for purpose. A good commercial stress survey tool would normally include the HSE stress questions.
How are you going to make sure all staff are consulted and have a chance to give their views? This is critically important. Be aware of the need of groups such as remote workers or shift workers who can easily be missed out. Make sure you take steps so that all staff groups have an equal opportunity to take part. If some groups feel they were not involved or consulted, they will feel ignored and this can cause bad feeling and mistrust.
Will you carry out the survey yourself or use consultants? There are pros and cons of using consultants for Stress Risk Assessment. It can seem cheaper to do it yourself, but you need to take into account the time and manpower required and that consultants have streamlined processes and technology to do this task. The most important consideration is perhaps the issue of independence. If you do it yourself, will your workforce will be cynical or suspicious about the process? A major benefit of using external expertise / consultants is their perceived independence.
How are you going to categorise the workforce for the purpose of benchmarking and comparative analysis? This is a very important aspect to consider. Best practice guidelines such as those from the British Psychological Society advise that results should only be fed back for groups with more than 10 respondents, so original group sizes should ideally be 25 or more to allow for lower response rates. In larger organizations there can be a number of useful breakdowns you could consider e.g. Main occupational role, department, location. It’s worth thinking about this carefully and discussing this with your consultants if you use them. It’s important also to be clear about how employees would label or categorise themselves, so that when they come to do the survey, they will easily assign themselves to the correct category.
How will you safeguard anonymity and confidentiality? This is vital because if people feel they can be identified, it will affect the way they answer, invalidating the results of any survey. There are a number of ways to improve perceptions of anonymity such as:
- Using an online survey
- Categorising the workforce using large groups
- Using external consultants for analysis and interpretation
- Careful thought on how paper questionnaires are dealt with so people feel they cannot be identified
- Making sure raw data cannot be seen by managers or employer representatives. (Your consultants should make sure raw data is kept confidential and only group results and analysis would normally be returned to the employer)
How are the results going to be communicated to managers and staff? This needs to be considered early on, as consulting on the results is a key part of the process. This is as much about communications strategy and managing expectations as it is about the actual dissemination of results. Managers and staff need to have confidence in the process and that they will be made aware of the results. They also need to know how they will be made aware, when, and what will happen after the results are published. Then once the survey is complete, you need to make sure you do things in exactly the way you said you were going to. Being consistent in this way breeds confidence. Because of this, the next survey will be much easier and you will see a substantial lowering of cynicism and a rise in response rates.
Are there alternatives to using a survey? The short answer can be 'yes' in certain circumstances and indeed alternatives might be better for much smaller organizations and groups. But you need to make sure that if you do use other methods such as focus groups that your Stress Risk Assessment is suitable and sufficient. For example, it is much easier to gather data efficiently and give everyone the opportunity to give their views if you’re
using a survey. It can be difficult or very expensive, or both, with other methods. If you need to gather the views of a substantial number of people, the best advice is to use a survey.
Step 3 – Evaluate the risks and decide on precautions
This step is about analysing and interpreting your results. If yours is a smaller organization, this may simply be looking at all your employees as one group and seeing how the results compare to national benchmark data. You should be able to see quickly where your organization’s stress management performance is good and where improvements can be made. If you are doing this yourself and using something like HSE’s Stress Indicator and Analysis Tool, the results are colour-coded so you can prioritise and see which types of work related stress hazard require to be addressed most urgently.
If yours is a larger organization, the analysis inevitably becomes more complex because you normally would be benchmarking both your organizational results and comparing results between staff group categories across the organization. Both types of analysis and benchmarking are important because the results often highlight both organizational stress issues (for example related to the culture of the organization) and local stress issues in particular areas that need to be addressed.
Often the internal comparisons (e.g. between departments) are the most interesting and useful. Although comparing your organization's results against national standards is useful, care needs to be taken interpreting the results because you are never really comparing like with like. However, internal comparisons (e.g. by department) within the same organization can be very revealing, highlighting hot-spots where there may be a number of stress problems and areas of excellence where stress risk is low and the quality of working life is high.
Analysis and interpretation can be somewhat problematic if done internally by a manager. If someone internal does do the analysis, they would need to be seen as having sufficient expertise and be sufficiently independent in order to avoid problems such as mistrust and cynicism about the results. This is often why many organizations use consultants.
Generally, survey data, which is quantitative in nature, is easier to analyse and interpret than qualitative data from other sources such as focus groups and interviews. It’s also far cheaper!
Ultimately, whatever methods you employ the kinds of questions you are looking to answer are the same, for example:
- Are there any organization-wide stress issues? What are they and how serious are they?
- How do your organization’s results compare with benchmark data? It’s great if you can make comparisons against other organizations in the same sector, but if you can’t, just use working population data.
- How do different groups e.g. departments compare with each other? Are there local stress problems specific to any departments? Does data give any indication as to why those local problems are occurring?
- Which departments are ‘beacons of excellence’ and managing stress well? What can be learned from those departments that can be applied to others to improve their performance?
Step 4 – Record your findings and implement them.
By now, you should have a good and comprehensive analysis of the data gathered. If you have used consultants, they should have produced a report providing organizational analysis and comparative analyses from departmental results.
This stage in a Stress Risk Assessment process is not just about recording but about reporting results. It’s a vital stage. You should have made it clear to managers and staff before the process started how results were going to be reported. Now it’s a matter of doing exactly what you said you would do. If you don’t, the whole process can backfire. Staff will wonder what you have to hide and jump to (usually negative) conclusions. On the other hand if you do exactly what you said you would in a timely manner, the whole
process will be viewed by staff in a positive way.
The best advice is to be open but concise with your feedback. Stick to the key results and conclusions. Your consultants may be able to provide departmental reports for managers and staff in each department that show in summary form how the department compares to others, and what the key issues are for that department. Another part of this stage is to develop and implement action plans. There are two aspects to this, organizational planning and local planning.
Organizational results need to be discussed at a senior level. If you have a stress management or well-being steering group in your organization, they will normally be involved in this too and may report back to the board or senior management team. You will need to make some decisions about organizational priorities for action. These may be general actions you judge will improve stress management performance right across the organization, such as policy development, culture change, management training and improved, more responsive support structures.
For local action planning, it is critically important to involve local managers and staff teams. They need to take ownership of their results and develop and implement their own plans. This has three important benefits: firstly this gives local management and staff teams a greater sense of involvement and control; secondly, this makes it more likely plans will be practicable, and; thirdly, it is far more likely that implemented plans will be effective.
Consultants are sometimes used to provide support with facilitation of action planning and with more often with training for managers in managing stress risks at work.
Step 5 – Review your assessment and update if necessary.
This final step is really about evaluating what has been done and deciding if it has been effective in preventing and reducing stress at both organizational and local levels. Typically, some actions have been more effective than others in reducing the risk of stress. Sometimes major organizational changes occur that have an impact on staff after the implementation of action plans and that needs to be taken into account when evaluating and reviewing what has been done. It's important that local managers and teams are involved in this stage. Although it is good for someone (or a steering group) to oversee the evaluation process, local managers and staff need to be given some responsibility for evaluating their own action plans and making changes if necessary.