The flood of claims for workplace stress looks set to recede after a ruling in the Court of Appeal this month overturned three damages awards against employers in stress-related cases.
Yet, despite the ruling, concerns about stress are likely to intensify in offices and boardrooms as companies demand more of their employees. The question remains: who is responsible for controlling stress - the individual or the managers?
It is a question that Rob Briner, lecturer in occupational psychology at Birkbeck College, London, has been researching for the past 18 months. Funded by the Health and Safety Executive, he has examined nine workplace stressors - including workload, communication, home/work balance, role ambiguity, job security and management support - in an attempt to understand the dynamics of stress and its effects on employees. Mr Briner's work will form the basis of a set of HSE standards to help employees and managers deal more effectively with workplace stress.
His work is timely. According to the HSE, half a million people in the UK are suffering from work-related stress, anxiety or depression, while 6.5m working days are lost through stress-related illnesses in the UK each year. A recent Industrial Society survey found that 86 per cent of workers felt stress was a problem in their organisation, with 36 per cent regarding it as a significant issue.
While Mr Briner is sceptical about the nature of stress and the multi-million-pound industry that has grown up around it over the past 20 years, he does accept that work can be harmful on some levels.
Technically, stress is a meaningless term. No one suffers from stress per se - they suffer from anxiety disorders or depression. Stress has been pathologised as the individual's reaction to work rather than being understood as a symptom of problems in the organisation.
He believes responsibility for stress has fallen squarely on employers in recent years - hence the record number of court cases - but the recent ruling makes clear that employees have a duty to inform employers about their stress and, ultimately, take some responsibility for managing it. Mr Briner says standards will help both sides to identify the components of work-related stress and encourage them to work together to find ways to reduce it.
Colin Mackay, principal psychologist of the HSE, says the executive chose to develop management standards rather than focusing on employee assistance or counselling programmes because it wanted to adopt a preventive approach to stress management. "We wanted to identify and understand the characteristics of work that cause health problems," he says.
Factors such as high workload, lack of control and inadequate support are known to damage people's health, he says, and by analysing various stressors and how they interact, it will be possible to draft a set of universal standards.
An early draft standard for managing workload, for example, encourages human resources professionals and line managers to make realistic assessments of the nature and quantity of workloads when designing and recruiting for jobs; it calls for staff training in workload management and the use of formal mechanisms to report workload problems; and demands that senior managers redistribute workload in exceptional circumstances, such as periods of organis-ational change.
Mr Mackay says that while the UK has taken the lead over Europe and the US in developing management standards for stress, it will be the end of 2003 before the first three standards are piloted and a further two years before a complete set is developed. The HSE will decide whether to formalise the standards into code or law when it has some idea of how organisations react to them. If they are not adopted voluntarily, the HSE may consider defining a code of practice, he suggests.
While employees may think the HSE's work is too distant to be of any benefit to them, Owen Tudor, health and safety officer of the Trades Union Congress, says standards are needed now in order to develop a best practice approach. "We need rules of engagement," he says. "Employers need to know what they have to do and employees need to know what they can expect from employers."
Roger Mead, an independent stress management consultant, agrees. "There is a lot of information about what stress is but very little about how you can assess it as a risk and make changes to reduce it," he says. Managers must count the financial as well as the personal costs of stress: the lost days, increased staff turnover, poor customer service and low morale.
However, Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, believes the best way to understand and prevent workplace stress is to conduct a stress audit or risk assessment programme. "Every organisation is different and every job is different. The baseline has to be a systematic diagnosis of what is happening in [indivi