There are some pretty damning statistics out there that demonstrate how rife the working world is with mental health problems. In 2021/2022 alone, 51% of all work-related ill health cases in the UK were related to stress, depression or anxiety. This accounts for hundreds of thousands of workers across the country who suffer from some sort of mental health problem at work.
As an employer, this presents you with a significant challenge. How do you help in supporting employee mental health at work?
Now, this isn’t a question you can just ignore. There are certain laws in place that dictate an employer has to support employees with mental health concerns in the workplace. We’ll talk more about this in just a moment, as well as some of the key things you can do to assist your struggling employees.
What does the law say about supporting employee mental health?
According to the HSE, employers have a legal duty to protect workers from stress at work by doing a risk assessment and acting on it.
Furthermore, the Health and Safety at Work Act (1974) underlines that employers need to keep their employees safe and healthy at work at all times. This includes mental health, which relates to things like stress.
In other words, you need to do everything within your power to support employees with any mental health problems. A stress risk assessment is just one example of something you can do. Other things include:
- Checking the work environment to make it safer and less stressful
- Ensuring that nobody on your team is discriminated against for having a mental health issue
How do we define stress at work?
Before you take steps to help employees with stress and other mental health problems, you need to understand what is meant by stress.
According to WHO, stress is defined as any type of change that causes physical, emotional or psychological strain.
In the UK, one workplace stress study of over 1,000 employees showed that 53% of women and 43% of men attribute their work-related stress to their workload. In essence, they are being asked to do too much work, which puts them under more mental stress than is considered healthy.
Alongside this, there are five other key areas of work design that can influence someone’s stress levels:
- Working relationships
- Their role at work
- Changes in their job
- Support provided by employers
- The control they have over their working life
Understanding these things is really important when it comes to carrying out a workplace stress risk assessment.
Conducting a workplace stress risk assessment
This risk assessment is an essential step in supporting employee mental health. Effectively, it is designed to pinpoint where people are likely to get their stress from at work. We’ve already touched upon them above, but the HSE outlines the six management standards you should follow, which you can find right here:
Demands
This is what we were talking about relating to the workload in the workplace. Many employees feel stressed when too much work is piled on their plate, but issues can also arise when someone isn’t given enough work.
Looking at these elements helps you pinpoint any hazards at work that may cause stress. From here, you can come up with solutions to reduce stress at work, aiding employees with mental health problems.
Control
Employees feel more stressed when they have no control over their work. This is perhaps best reflected in a study that found 65% of people were anxious about returning to the office after COVID. Working from home offered the flexibility to control more aspects of your working life. Employees could set their own schedules and decide where and how to work. In the office, it’s not always this simple, and a lack of control leads to more stress.
Support
Simply put, employees who don’t feel supported by their seniors are likely to have higher stress levels at work. Moreover, you can think about support from a mental health perspective too. Does your business train people to deal with stress? According to one study, only 56% of organisations actually train managers to manage stress.
Relationships
This somewhat ties into the Support factor, but employees with bad working relationships tend to feel more stressed. There needs to be good communication between managers and employees to create a stress-free environment.
Role
When employees have clear roles, they feel less stressed. Problems arise when there is confusion surrounding roles and what an individual is actually supposed to be doing.
Change
If your business changes things and fails to communicate them with employees, they will likely feel very stressed, particularly when big changes happen – such as layoffs, alterations to schedules, etc.
Why are workplace stress risk assessments so important?
As we mentioned in the beginning, the stats surrounding mental health at work are shocking. Did you know 17.9 million working days were lost due to stress, anxiety or depression last year?
It’s true, and things keep on getting worse. Nearly 80% of companies have seen a stress-related absence over the last year, and 90% of organisations with over 250 employees say the same.
Essentially, stress and mental health are causing lost working days for companies. Naturally, this translates to a loss of productivity – and, ultimately, a loss of money. It’s a problem that has been growing steadily over the last six years. The annual NHS Staff Survey in 2020 dictated that 44% of employees felt unwell due to work-related stress that year, an increase from 36.8% in 2016.
If you want your business to be healthier and happier, you must focus on supporting employee mental health. Stress risk assessments are the best way to do this. They let you identify the main causes of stress at work and what you can do to mitigate them. Remember, it is your legal obligation to provide a duty of care for your employees in the workplace. If you don’t, there could be grounds for them to sue you for negligence.
With that in mind, you can start implementing stress risk assessments in your workplace by downloading the following resources below:
Both do similar things, but one is geared towards those in management positions rather than general employees.
Assessing and reducing stress is Phase 1 of a 3 phase approach to workplace mental health. Assessing the risks of stress helps to take steps to prevent stress and mental ill health. Phase 2 is to promote all things positive around mental health to help build resilience and the ability to cope with adversity. Phase 3 is to support all with mental ill health regardless of cause.