Stress and the Law

The legal reasons for tackling stress at work:

Health and Safety at Work Act 1974: Places a duty on organisations to look after the health and safety and well being of their employees. This is both in physical and mental health.

Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999: states that an organisation with five or more employees must:

  • Take reasonable steps to identify risks to health of stress at work
  • Manage the risk i.e: assesss the risk and minimise it.

Disability Discrimination Act 1995 in some cases covers staff that have long term mental health illnessess relating to stress, therefore an organisation must make reasonable adjustments to their work.

Guidance from Health and Executive:

The Health and Safety Executive issued the Management Standards for stress at work in November 2004. The aim of the standards are to work with employees and their representatives to continuoulsy improve performance in tackling work-related stress.

They have identified 6 key areas of risk for stress:

  • Demands
  • Control
  • Support
  • Relationships
  • Role
  • Change

The HSE guidance is based on:

  • The organisation has good management practice
  • Prevention rather than cure
  • Shifting the workforce from an “undesirable state” to a “desirable state”
  • The best avalable evidence
  • They have support from Managers- NOT an enforcement led approach
  • A risk assessment approach

We advise that organisations who acknowledge that stress is a problem, who have a written policy on stress and run regular stress management courses, will be at less risk of a successful claim made against them.

Litigation claims are on the increase and could possible include the loss of future earnings this could have serious financial implications on your company.

The risk of litigation - check out the case study!