Medical practitioners, government agencies, and consultants often disagree on the best approach to managing stress. They fail to provide managers with practical strategies for improving cases where employees are stressed. This may be due to the complexity of stress management and the numerous variables involved.

Similarly, UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) publications often lack specific guidance on managing stress in firms. While they provide statistics on identifying stress issues, they lack actionable steps.

This paper combines current theory, research, HSE guidelines, and ideas from other disciplines to offer a practical approach to managing work-based stress.

Stress is a syndrome caused by excessive stimulation of the ‘fight or flight’ response. The body releases stress hormones, which are natural but can become harmful if the stimulation is relentless. Troops in a battlefield, for example, need rest to recover.

Stress

Under the stress syndrome, employees exhibit either psychological or physiological effects due to stressors. Stressors at work can be confusing instructions or insufficient skills. Stress is normal, but it can be balanced by personal characteristics and competencies, allowing for coping.

Contrary to popular myth, high workloads don’t cause stress. Many workers cope with very high, intense workloads without stress.

When stress manifests psychologically or physiologically, there’s an imbalance. The employee’s coping strategies aren’t strong enough to balance the extant strain. To cause stress, this imbalance might be extreme in the short-term, moderate in the medium-term, or modest, but relentless, in the long-term.

When things come to a head, it’s usually because coping has stopped. It could be because a team member has left or there’s been inadequate training for a new work system.

Stress management approach

This necessitates a stress management approach. Managers must work to regain balance. The only options are to remove the stressors or enhance coping. Maintaining the status quo isn’t an option since the job-employee system has changed. It must be re-balanced by design or default, or the employee must learn to cope.

Typically, when an imbalance occurs, doctors prescribe removing stressors and signing employees off work for weeks. However, the system isn’t balanced when they return, and stress occurs again.

These simple fixes don’t work.

The HSE’s stress management framework provides a set of standards that offer analysis and action for managing stress. These standards reflect current research on job stressors and their positive aspects. However, the HSE approach assumes that employers are solely responsible for balancing employee stress. Stress management requires both employers and employees to work collaboratively. The HSE Stress Management framework is shown adjacent.

Let’s examine the HSE Management Standards and their meanings. The titles of the standards are underlined, and comments and action ideas are provided.

• Demands: Job requirements, necessarily balanced by adequate personal and system resources. If not balanced, action is needed to boost resources.
• Control: Can job holders make decisions about when and how they do jobs efficiently? If not, discussion is needed to allow more work autonomy.
• Support: Is adequate support provided for scheduling work and overcoming task difficulties? If not, analysis is needed to secure better support.
• Change: Is the job holder constantly exposed to changes? Change should be introduced gradually, allowing employees time to adapt.
• Job awareness: Ensure job holders understand their roles and interactions. If they feel like pawns in a system, they may need training and involvement.
• Relationships: Positive colleague and manager relationships reduce stress. Negative relationships, such as bullying and harassment, can elevate stress. Action may be needed to improve relationships.

The HSE framework focuses on the work environment as the root cause of problems, but this isn’t always the case.

Stressors together

Stressors act together, like forces in physics. They have magnitude, direction, and duration. A short, intense stressor may seem significant, but employees cope well because it’s temporary. For example, a police officer engaged in a public order conflict.

Conversely, weak negative stressors acting together continuously can wear employees down. Positive attributes of work, like high employee competence, strong relationships, and sound management support balance negative stressors.

Finally, every person has a work life and a home life.

Carers, volunteers, and employees with relationships and children face home life stressors. Analysing their home lives using the HSE framework can reveal spillover between work and home, causing strain.

A net positive home situation can balance a net negative work situation, illustrating stress situation analysis as a complex picture-building process.

However, this doesn’t help managers implement precise work-based interventions to regain balance or improve coping.

Practical control

The analogy of a feedback control loop in systems engineering and electronics can be used to manage stress. This is shown adjacent.

Inputs are Management Standards from the HSE framework, outputs are personal performance, and stress reduces performance. The system employs a control loop that feeds back performance to the input to trigger corrective action.

When performance drops because of stress, feedback indicates below-par performance, prompting action to correct and re-balance the loop.

In managing stress, managers need to identify which Management Standards are out of balance. This can be done through questionnaires or discussions.

Let’s assume job demands exceed employee resources due to lack of skills or knowledge. To balance the strain and enable coping, the manager may mentor or arrange personal development for the employee. If the imbalance persists, performance may continue to suffer prompting further action.

Managing work based stress

The manager must ‘sense’ what works and try it. This involves looking, listening, enquiring, and not denying. The manager senses the system’s output and tries alternative actions if the chosen one doesn’t work. Positive results are sustained, while less effective ones are discarded.

The manager continues until the employee’s stressor-strain system is balanced, and psychological or physiological effects reduce below the strain threshold, with tolerable symptoms. At that point the employee copes.

Coping varies between individuals due to personal characteristics. Some have ‘inner strength’ and better context-setting. The person suffering stress can act, such as getting rest, taking holidays, eating well, and staying fit. Holidays, hobbies, and weekends interrupt relentless pressure, turning a stressful job into something the jobholder copes with and even thrives in.

The personal characteristics device, the rectangular box, can be changed. It’s developed like the company environment, sensing changes that might balance the coping threshold. The person makes changes in themselves, measures the outcome, and repeats.

Ultimately, the manager may realise the wrong person is in the job. Moving the sufferer to a better-suited job may be the solution.

Stress isn’t inevitable. Both the person and the environment can be changed, but there’s no magic solution. The manager talks to the employee, investigates causes, senses root causes, and implements change. The manager and employee adopt what works and abandon what doesn’t until the manager is satisfied with performance and the employee copes with the stress levels.