Management standards
The Management Standards cover six key areas of work design that, if not properly managed, are associated with poor health and wellbeing, lower productivity and increased sickness absence. In other words, the Standards cover the primary sources of stress at work.
1. Demands
Includes issues such as workload, work patterns and the work environment.
2. Control
How much say do the people have over the way they work?
3. Support
Includes encouragement, sponsorship and resources provided by the organisation, line management and colleagues.
4. Relationships
Includes promoting positive working to avoid conflict and dealing with unacceptable behaviour.
5. Role
Do people understand their role within the organisation and does the organisation ensure roles are not conflicting?
6. Change
How is organisational change (large and small) managed and communicated? For each Standard there must be systems in place locally to respond to any individual concerns. These Standards are aspirational and define a desirable set of conditions for organisations to work towards.
What is the Management Standards approach to tackling work-related stress?
The Management Standards approach is an organisational, preventative process for managing the risks to your employees from work-related stress. It is a free-to-use toolkit that helps employers prepare for and conduct an appropriate risk assessment and gives ideas for what to do when you have the results. You do not have to use the Management Standards approach, but following it will show you have met your legal duties. If you do not use the Management Standards approach you must use a suitably equivalent approach. To establish whether your current process is equivalent see the equivalence checklist.
Applying the Management Standards to your organisation
If you are using the Management Standards approach, it is important to understand how the Standards apply and translate to your workplace. This includes looking at how they fit into your existing risk assessment process. The six key areas of the Management Standards cover the primary sources of stress at work. They do not always act on their own but often they combine, overlap or interact. Consider the ‘job’ as a whole and avoid taking action on one element of work at a time as this may just move any problem further down the line – a global approach is likely to produce the best result. There may be organisational ‘hot spots’ you want to concentrate on, but these can best be identified by carrying out a systematic risk assessment. Your aim is to find out the potential work causes of stress in your workplace and the likelihood of injury.
Good management practice
The Management Standards help measure how well you are managing the potential causes of work-related stress. Each Standard provides simple statements about good management practice in each of the six areas. These include the Standard itself and, in particular, the statements of ‘What should be happening?’
The Standards represent targets for the organisation, goals that employers should be working towards in an ongoing process of risk assessment and continuous improvement. The Management Standards approach aims to help identify where your organisation is in terms of performance and sets realistic targets for improvement.
Find out more here: www.hse.gov.uk/stress
Source:
Tackling work-related stress using the Management Standards approach A step-by-step workbook