Reproduced with kind permission of Professor Cooper of Robertson Cooper Ltd
This article first appeared in The Telegraph

For Pity's sake, Stop the Work, I want to Get Off...
by Professor Cary Cooper

Stress can damage health, cost millions and affect your brand, but there are steps employers can take.

Workplace stress is booming. And employers have received countless warnings from stress experts and other sources that it will only be a matter of time before they are bombarded with claims for compensation from stressed-out workers. But are employers taking the necessary steps to ensure they will not be the next generation to hit the headlines for the wrong reasons?

For those who feel the stress is little more than media hype a quick look at the facts can be revealing. the costs of stress at work are rising fast. Last year, employers experienced a record 164,000 claims for stress-related illness and injury - up by more than a third on the previous year. Each day 270,000 people in the UK take time off work due to stress, and each year stress costs £7 billion through lost production, sickness payments and NHS charges.

Across the Atlantic the American experience offers a foretaste of what Britain may soon be experiencing. There, the Workers Compensation Scheme - a no-fault insurance scheme to compensate for work-related accidents and injuries has been inundated with floods of claims related to mental instead of physical injury.

In recent months, we have witnessed at least half a dozen cases of claimants being awarded up to£ 300,000. Only last month was the case of the primary school teacher who was awarded over 250,000 because of severe work-related stress, which caused two nervous breakdowns. Such cases should certainly cause employers to sit up and take note, especially since bigger settlements are being awarded more frequently.

For larger employers, these payments may seem trifling, but the greater danger lies in longer term damage to a company’s reputation from bad publicity, which then leads to problems in attracting and retaining good employees. Employers would be wise not to ignore the damage such litigation can do to their reputations. Coverage of employment tribunals, by all types of media, ensures that headline-grabbing cases are widely noticed. Such coverage hurts.

The ever-tightening labour market and competition at the top for the best talent means that prospective employees are becoming more choosy about the type of organisation they want to work for. Employer grand matters. People are no longer happy to work for Gradgrind employers or those who seem to have poor employee relations. Similarly consumers are becoming more demanding. They want to know that the product or service they buy has been produced by an organisation that is interested in all its stakeholders, and not just in short-term bottom line performance.

So, why are we so stressed?

Unfortunately, many people are the victims of imposed stress as organisations fight to survive. In the early 1990s, many companies slashed costs and down-sized, leaving fewer people with far more work. Such a climate has helped promote a culture of “presenteeism”, making employees feel that being at work from very early to very late shows more loyalty and commitment to the organisation - all in the vain hope they will be the last to be given the chop in the
next wave of redundancies.

Working patterns are also changing, short-term contracts and part-time working grew rapidly during the course of the 1990s. Such a climate of uncertainty has led to stress litigation in this country becoming an ever-present reality - though not yet at US levels. What is worrying is that the trend is mirroring US experience.

Though the whole tribunal process is under review, employers should concentrate on measures that can help avoid any further rise in stress-related litigation. The prevention of all workplace stress is an unreasonable ideal but there are measures that employers can take to help employees cope with the new pressures of the 21st century workplace.

First, employers really need some form of risk assessment as a precondition to taking the necessary steps to satisfy their duty of care to employees. A good starting point is for employers to acquaint themselves with material such as the Health and Safety Executive guidelines which offer information about about the common sources of stress and how stress manifests itself in the workplace.

Other organisations such as the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development have produced useful guidance material along the same lines. A stress audit may help to diagnose any potential problems. This usually takes the form of a self-report questionnaire administered to employees on an organisation-wide or departmental basis to identify the sources of stress at work and those employees most at risk of suffering stress-related illness.

Finally, organisations should commit themselves to developing the kind of culture where stress is recognised as a feature of modern industrial life and not interpreted as a sign of weakness or incompetence. Such commitment must be driven from the top of the organisation as well as through line managers and the HR department. Workplace stress is a growing problem and the sosts of ignoring it are too high.

The motto for all employers in the 21st century needs to be “ignore stress at your peril“.

Cary Cooper is Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health, Manchester School of Management. Robertson Cooper is a business psychology consultancy. Fore more information, please see their website

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