Work-Related Stress: 9 Things the Law Actually Requires
Most organisations treat stress as a wellbeing topic. There is an employee assistance programme, a mental health awareness week, perhaps some mental health first aiders, and a general sense that the organisation is doing something.
Those are reasonable things to provide, and none of them is what the law asks for.
Work-related stress is a health and safety matter, governed by the same duties as any other risk to health, and the obligation is to assess the causes and act on them rather than to help people cope with them.
Nine things.
1. It is a health and safety duty
Start with the legal position, because it determines who owns this.
Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to the health and safety of employees.
Health includes mental health. That is not a modern reinterpretation; it is how HSE has long treated the duty, and its work-related stress material sets out the expectation.
So the function that owns risk assessment owns this, whatever the organisation chart says.
2. Work-related stress has a specific meaning
The definition matters, because it sets the boundary of the duty.
Work-related stress is the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressures or other demands placed on them at work. It is a response to work design and organisation.
Two consequences. An employer is not responsible for assessing somebody's life circumstances. And an employer is responsible for the pressures it creates, whether or not the individual also has pressures elsewhere.
It is also not the same as mental ill health generally. Somebody may have a condition unconnected to work, which engages adjustments and support rather than this duty. The two overlap and are not identical.
3. HSE's framework names six areas
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The practical tool, and it is the closest thing to a checklist available.
HSE's Management Standards identify six areas that, if not properly managed, are associated with poor health and lower productivity: demands, control, support, relationships, role, and change.
Read that list against any organisation and it describes work design rather than individual resilience. Demands is workload and pace. Control is how much say people have. Support is what the organisation and colleagues provide. Relationships covers conflict and unacceptable behaviour. Role is clarity and conflicting duties. Change is how organisational change is managed and communicated.
4. Wellbeing provision does not discharge the duty
The point this article exists to make.
An employee assistance programme is a support service. Mental health first aiders are a support measure. Resilience training helps individuals cope. None of them assesses or changes the causes.
The analogy is exact: providing a first aid kit does not discharge the duty to prevent injury. Provision for people who are already affected is worth having and is not a control for the hazard.
An organisation with an excellent wellbeing offer and no assessment of its working patterns has bought the treatment and skipped the prevention.
5. The duty is to assess the causes
What is actually required.
An assessment looks at the six areas above, in your organisation, for identifiable groups of people, and identifies what needs to change. HSE publishes guidance on carrying out a stress risk assessment, and our own guide to stress risk assessment covers the method.
The key discipline is to assess by group rather than individual. Which teams, roles or periods concentrate the pressure? A trading desk at month end, a support team during an incident, a professional services team during a pitch, an on-call rota, a function mid-restructure.
6. Signs it is a work design problem, not an individual one
Five indicators that point at the organisation rather than the person.
It clusters. Several people in the same team, doing the same work, reporting the same thing.
It follows the work, not the people. New arrivals in a role develop the same difficulties as their predecessors.
Turnover is concentrated. One team loses people faster than the rest.
Absence follows a pattern. Short-notice absence rises around the same points in a cycle.
People work around the process. Widespread informal workarounds usually mean the official way of working is not achievable.
None of these requires anybody to disclose anything personal, which is why they are useful.
7. What an employer should actually do
Six practical steps, and none is a campaign.
Identify the groups most exposed. Ask them, in a form that allows honest answers. Look at the data you already hold on hours, absence, turnover and reporting. Decide what will change, with owners and dates. Tell people what you decided, including what you are not changing and why. Review it.
The fifth step is the one most often skipped, and it is the one that determines whether people engage next time.
8. Individual cases still need handling
The duty is organisational, and individuals still present.
Where somebody is struggling and the cause is partly or wholly work, the response has two halves: something for them now, which may include adjustments, occupational health involvement or a temporary change in duties, and something about the cause, which is the assessment above.
Doing only the first is common. It resolves the immediate situation and leaves the next person to encounter the same thing.
Where an individual assessment is needed, the approach is the one covered in our work on individual risk assessments: ask about the work, not the diagnosis.
9. Record it, and expect to be asked
The evidential half.
Record the assessment, what you found, what you decided, and what changed. Where a pressure is being accepted, record that with the reasoning, because an explicit accepted risk is defensible and an unexamined one is not.
Two audiences increasingly ask. Boards, where officers carry duties framed around verification rather than receipt. And clients, whose supplier assurance questionnaires now routinely cover workforce wellbeing.
The nine, in short
| Point | Position |
|---|---|
| Legal status | A health and safety duty under regulation 3 |
| Definition | Reaction to pressures at work; about work design |
| Framework | Demands, control, support, relationships, role, change |
| Wellbeing provision | Support, not a control for the hazard |
| The duty | Assess the causes, by group |
| Diagnostics | Clustering, role-following, turnover, absence, workarounds |
| Action | Identify, ask, look at data, decide, tell people, review |
| Individuals | Handle the person and the cause |
| Records | What you decided, including what you accepted |
Row four is the one to take to a board. Most organisations are spending on row four and have not done row five.
For international groups
Two considerations, and the second is moving quickly.
Britain treats this through the general assessment duty. There is no dedicated psychosocial regulation; the obligation sits inside regulation 3 and the Management Standards are guidance.
A growing number of jurisdictions regulate it directly. France requires psychosocial risk in its mandatory assessment document. Sweden and Denmark regulate the organisational and social working environment, including workload and working hours. Brazil brought psychosocial factors within its risk management programme. Chile, Mexico and Colombia require prescribed instruments or protocols. Australia has introduced psychosocial duties. Lithuania and Slovenia address it expressly, and Slovenia requires a funded health promotion plan inside a statutory document.
A group applying the British approach across those entities will be doing less than the local law requires. Holding assessments and actions for every entity in one register is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone, and periodic health and safety audits establish which entities have assessed this at all.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite assesses the causes rather than providing the coping support, which is the half most organisations have not done. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years.
Our health and safety consultants work extensively with finance and banking, legal and IT and software organisations, where the significant risks are organisational rather than physical and the working patterns are the thing worth assessing.
Where entities sit in several countries, our global health and safety consultants establish which jurisdictions impose express psychosocial duties, and our international health and safety consultants keep that current as more of them do.
If your organisation has an employee assistance programme and no assessment of its working patterns, a free gap analysis is the right place to start.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
