HSE gets tough on Stress Management

Employers are being urged to improve their management of stress at work issues after it emerged that the Health and Safety Executive issued an improvement notice for stress against the Lincolnshire NHS Trust.

This latest improvement notice shows that the HSE will not shy away from taking action when employers fail to meet their stress management obligations under the health & safety laws.

You should always take the health of your staff seriously and stress is often an area that is overlooked as the symptoms are not always physically displayed. Of course, this does not make stress any less important and we have an obligation to ensure that staff who become subject to stress issues are treated with the respect and care they deserve.

Recent statistics confirm that work-related stress is widespread in the UK working population and is not confined to particular sectors or high risk jobs or industries.

An annual absence survey carried out last year by CBI/AXA, found that non work-related stress, anxiety and depression was the most common cause of long-term absence. Government guidelines on how to manage it and a growing pile of evidence on tackling stress have not solved the problem.

Another report by the Royal College of Psychiatrists adds that sickness absences due to mental health problems such as stress are likely to be longer than those caused by physical health problems, accounting for 47% of long-term absence.

It is important that all businesses take the subject of stress management seriously. Ensuring staff are aware of stress issues and how to cope goes some way to ensuring they are better prepared to cope with stressful situations. Add to this a clear policy on stress and a structured method of working and levels of workplace stress can be reduced.

Make your staff aware of Stress Management and methods of coping with stress by delivering the Trainer Bubble training course materials on Stress Management.

Embed a key learning point through humorous movies!

Always on the look out for novel ways to get a message across during training courses, I was excited when I found a collection of websites that allow you to subtitle your own words over different movie clips. These movies allow you to create your own input and develop a memorable clip related to any topic you want to present to your participants.

The possibilities are endless and you can play around with the idea as much as you want until you feel it is right. The method of delivery is both fun and memorable as the following clip on this link will show...

http://www.grapheine.com/classiktv/index.php?module=see&lang=uk&code=0a8dcc77381389d614bd8ff2f89e3be3

Give it a go yourself. You might want to use it to get across a message about a new product or to embed learning from a training issue that you are discussing. Here's another one I put together in about 2 minutes...

http://www.grapheine.com/classiktv/index.php?module=see&lang=fr&code=053a194bd64ba3387025223f43b202e6

Here's a few links of sites that provide this free service...

http://www.grapheine.com/classiktv/index.php

http://www.grapheine.com/bombaytv/

http://www.grapheine.com/bombaytv/v2/

http://www.grapheine.com/futeboltv/

Have fun!