Work-related stress develops because a person is unable to cope with the demands being placed on them. Stress, including work-related stress, can be a significant cause of illness and is known to be linked with high levels of sickness absence, staff turnover and other issues such as more errors.
Research shows that employee stress levels are rising in line with the demands of the 21st-century workplace. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development's Absence Management Survey 2013 has indicated that stress remains one of the most common causes of both long- and short-term sickness for both manual and non-manual employees. Two-fifths of organisations reported an increase in stress-related absence over the previous year, rising to more than half in the public sector.
The Health and Safety Executive's (HSE) 2013 report on Stress and Psychological Disorders highlights the cost to employers of this trend, showing that "work-related stress caused workers in Great Britain to lose 10.4 million working days in 2011/2012".
The findings of EU-OSHA's European Survey of Enterprises on New and Emerging Risks, undertaken in 2009, on new and emerging workplace risks which found that 79 per cent of managers think that stress is an issue in their companies, making stress at work as important as workplace accidents for companies.
Civil claims
There is no basis for a legal complaint arising from "stress at work". However, personal injury claims for psychiatric injury (as distinct from "stress") will succeed where:
- the harm was foreseeable;
- an employer has breached his duty of care; and
- where that breach has caused or contributed materially to the injury.
Claims for psychiatric injury resulting from work-related stress are usually brought as claims in negligence, and are no different from claims involving physical injuries. As such, the threshold of foreseeability remains the most difficult aspect for a claimant to establish, given the nature of psychiatric illness and the reality of the workplace.
Criminal requirements and sanctions
All employers have duties under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 to assess the risk of stress-related ill health arising from work activities, and, under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, to take measures to control that risk.
The HSE may issue improvement notices in respect of work-related stress where employers have failed to assess the risk of work-related stress in the workplace or, where having carried out a risk assessment, they have failed to take adequate steps to address those risks. Improvement notices require such contraventions (or matters occasioning the contravention) of statutory provisions to be remedied within a specified timeframe.
HSE Management Standards
The HSE has developed the Management Standards (the Standards) approach to tackling work-related stress. The Standards represent a set of conditions that, if present, reflect a high level of health, well-being and organisational performance. In other words, the six Standards cover the primary sources of stress at work. These are:
- Demands – issues such as workload, work patterns and the work environment;
- Control – how much say the person has in the way they do their work;
- Support – the encouragement, sponsorship and resources provided by the organisation, line management and colleagues;
- Relationships – promoting positive working to avoid conflict and dealing with unacceptable behaviour;
- Role – whether people understand their role within the organisation and whether the organisation ensures that they do not have conflicting roles; and
- Change – how organisational change (large or small) is managed and communicated in the organisation.
These indicate a good starting point for managing civil and criminal claims in the workplace.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
