I was sitting at my desk yesterday trying to come up with a fitting topic for my first ever blog entry – then it came to me - as these often do - via email. A summary of some new research by Employment Review dropped into my inbox from Personnel Today and that was that. The research found that most employers focus on helping employees who have suffered stress-related ill health to return to work rather than actually tackling its causes.
I thought that this was a bit worrying so I read on. The study was based on a survey of HR practitioners in 74 organisations, their conclusion is based on a finding that employers tend to have just two methods of seeking to reduce stress-related absences and four to help staff return to work from stress-related illness. This doesn’t surprise me at all as most organisations are in ‘reactive mode’ in the current economic climate where the majority of employees feel overloaded with work.
There were encouraging signs, however, because the survey found that HR practitioners were most likely to rate work-life balance initiatives as the most effective type of stress-management intervention. The next most popular interventions were risk assessments like those recommended by the HSE, stress awareness training for managers and in turn, making stress a part of regular staff appraisals. Less popular approaches included culture change programmes, Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs) and counselling services.
This is a positive finding because it indicates that practitioners are at least starting to think more proactively about dealing with stress at work. In my experience, the key to tackling work-related stress is dealing with the causes – using what are known as Primary level interventions. Dealing with symptoms by helping people to cope better is fine, but real behavioural and organisational change comes from understanding and dealing with the things that block well-being at work – like the need for control, work-life balance and work overload. In that sense it’s good see that HR practitioners see the value of using a risk assessment approach to find the causes of stress. Slightly more worrying is that they don’t also see this as the starting point for a culture change programme.
The article is at: http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2007/12/03/43496/most-employers-fail-to-tackle-stress-at-early-stage.html
