This briefing will give you the essential background information and advice on implementing the necessary arrangements to support employee wellbeing and avoid prosecution or civil liability.
Introduction
The widest definition of stress is anything which makes a person tense, angry, frustrated or unhappy. This clearly includes workplace pressures.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) defines stress as follows.
The adverse reaction people have to excessive pressures or other types of demand placed upon them. This makes an important distinction between the beneficial effects of reasonable pressure and challenge, which can be stimulating, motivating and can give a “buzz”, and work-related stress, which is the natural but distressing reaction to demands or pressures with which a person perceives that they cannot cope.
Workplace stress is increasingly being recognised as a serious health and safety issue which all organisations and their directors must take steps to address. Work-related stressors which, it is generally accepted, may trigger stress reactions include:
excessive working hours
night shift working
structural changes
time pressures
contradictory instructions from superiors
conflict with colleagues
increased challenges
information technology issues
disciplinary proceedings
physical characteristics of the workplace
travel to and from work.
Legal requirements
There is no definition of stress in any health and safety regulations.
The general duties imposed by the Health and Safety at Work, etc Act 1974 (HSWA) under s.2, for the protection of employees, and s.3, for the protection of non-employees, apply to workplace stress issues. Employers have a general duty to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health of their employees and others at work. This implicitly covers stress caused by workplace conditions. Section 53 of the Act defines “personal injury” as any disease and any impairment of a person’s physical or mental condition.
The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 state that employers must take account of risks to workers. This includes risks related to workplace stress.
The Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992 refer explicitly to fatigue and stress associated with the use of display screen equipment. Employers are required to control exposure to conditions likely to result in fatigue or stress.
There are no reported stress-related prosecutions under health and safety regulations. However, there are a number of civil cases under the common law of negligence where employers have been ordered to pay large amounts of compensation to workers who have suffered stress-related conditions caused by workplace conditions.
Strategic leadership
Identification of stress and its sources
Directors and employers need to be able to identify stress and its sources in the workplace. Sources of information include:
talking to workers
performance appraisals
focus groups
sickness/absence data
questionnaires
productivity data
staff turnover
information from other organisations in your sector.
Stress management strategy
The organisation should assess the level of risk to individuals and the organisation as a whole through risk assessment. Leaders and other employees must understand the issue of work-related stress and be committed to taking action.
Improve levels of stress in the workplace by putting into effect the recommendations identified in the risk assessment. This should include helping workers to recognise and deal with the causes of stress, eg by providing stress awareness training.
Other recommendations may include the need for management training, eg communication skills, interpersonal skills, team building and investigations into allegations of harassment, discrimination and bullying.
Signs of stress
Managers must be trained to recognise the signs of excessive stress. Workers suffering from workplace stress may experience changes in behaviour, such as:
becoming withdrawn
lower standards of work performance
increased sickness absence
changes in timekeeping
becoming short-tempered, irritable or cynical.
Support
Support for individuals who develop stress-related problems may be provided by one or more of the following and should be signposted throughout the premises and in any training:
line manager
personnel department
human resources department
health and safety representatives
trade unions
employee assistance programme
external national agencies.
Relevant case law examples
The key civil case is Sutherland v Hatton and Others (2002) where the Court of Appeal heard four appeals by employers against compensation awards to employees who had suffered stress-induced psychiatric illness. Three of the appeals succeeded.
The Court ruled that the general principle was that employers should not have to pay compensation for stress-induced illness unless such illness was reasonably foreseeable. Employers are normally entitled to assume that workers can withstand the normal pressures of a job.
It stated a number of relevant principles including the following.
Employers do not have a duty to make searching inquiries about employees’ mental health.
Indications of impending harm to mental health at work must be clear enough to show that action should be taken.
Employers who offer confidential counselling services, with access to treatment, are unlikely to be found in breach of their duty of care in relation to stress.
The employer’s appeal which was dismissed was that of Olwen Jones, a local authority employee who had suffered from depression and anxiety as a result of overwork. It had been foreseeable that her workplace conditions would cause harm and the award of £150,000 damages was upheld.
Another example of the many civil workplace stress cases is Fraser v State Hospitals for Scotland (2000). F was a nurse in a high-security hospital. He was accused of failing to carry out proper security checks and was demoted. After six months he was diagnosed as suffering from stress and depression. He was later dismissed and claimed compensation from his employers. The claim failed. The Scottish court found that there was no reason why the employers could have been expected to foresee the consequences of their actions. The court made the following points.
The duty of care owed by an employer to take reasonable care to avoid exposing employees to the unnecessary risk of injury, extended to psychiatric damage and was not limited to physical injury.
The relationship between employer and employee created a relationship of sufficient proximity for there to be a duty not to cause the employee to sustain direct physical or psychiatric injury.
There was no duty to protect workers from unpleasant emotions which did not involve any form of injury at all.
It was not the duty of an employer to prevent an employee from suffering unpleasant emotions such as grief, anger, resentment or normal human conditions including anxiety or stress.
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