Frequently Asked Questions
Employers have a ‘duty of care’. This means they must do all they reasonably can to support their employees’ health, safety and wellbeing. This includes:
- making sure the working environment is safe
- protecting staff from discrimination
- carrying out risk assessments
- Employers must treat mental and physical health as equally important.
Although it may seem challenging to implement measures to manage the psychosocial risks in workplaces, there are some practical steps that employers can take such as:
- Invest in management training so that those with responsibility for others have the skills and capacity to do this effectively
- Ensure staff have the support they need – regular 1:1 catch ups with their manager or supervisor and participation in relevant mentoring and peer support schemes
- Monitor and manage workloads and ensure staff and teams are adequately resourced
- Check in regularly with staff working remotely
- Adopt a zero-tolerance policy to bullying, harassment and discrimination
- Address poor workplace relationships or conflict
- Support staff to work healthy hours, take breaks and their holiday entitlement
- Ensure transparent processes for work allocation, reward, and career progression
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- For those exposed to traumatic events or materials, provide education, support and training
- Provide flexible working arrangements e.g., working from home or flexible hours to allow more time for responsibilities outside work and for activities that support mental wellbeing
Adopting a proactive approach to managing psychosocial risks supports an engaged, productive, and inclusive workplace which enables people to thrive.
Your employer should have a clear policy on taking sick leave, including for mental health reasons.
The WHO recommends manager training for mental health, which helps managers recognise and respond to supervisees experiencing emotional distress; builds interpersonal skills like open communication and active listening; and fosters better understanding of how job stressors affect mental health and can be managed; training for workers in mental health literacy and awareness, to improve knowledge of mental health and reduce stigma against mental health conditions at work; and interventions for individuals to build skills to manage stress and reduce mental health symptoms, including psychosocial interventions and opportunities for leisure-based physical activity.
The following are responses to specific questions we asked of delegates after we ran this course for the first time.
The course did meet my expectations and I feel that I now have a better understanding of workplace stress and my responsibilities as an employer.
We had used the 6 HSE Management Standards as the basis of our stress risk assessment carried out last year so we will be completing this again within the next few months using what I learnt on the course.
I found the exercises that you added in very helpful, particularly the primary, secondary and tertiary intervention explanations.
