Employers may be failing to comply with legally required stress risk assessment rules due to a lack of awareness.
A survey of HR experts, who represent 88,000 UK workers, found a significant HR knowledge gap and compliance concerns around the Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) stress risk assessment.
The research, conducted by Occupational Health Assessment Ltd, revealed four in ten employers (41 percent) did not know that it is a legal requirement for organisations with five or more employees to conduct a formal stress risk assessment.
Survey results also showed that 25 percent of employers had never undertaken a stress risk assessment.
Almost one in three organisations (29 percent) had failed to complete such an assessment in the last three years despite regular reviews of existing plans being a central component of the HSE regulations.
Magnus Kauders, managing director of Occupational Health Assessment Ltd, said: “Stress has been identified as a key component of employee absence in the 2020s, with the HSE estimating that stress, depression and anxiety are a contributory factor in around half of all working days lost to ill health.
“Yet our research suggests that employers are still not actively tackling this important issue and many are not even aware of the minimum legal compliance levels required of them.”
The provider highlighted the recent investigation of the University of Birmingham as a warning. In this case, the employer allegedly failed to implement adequate procedures to prevent and minimise workplace stress.
This new research suggests that many other employers may also struggle to meet these requirements.
Steve Herbert, brand ambassador at Occupational Health Assessment Ltd, added: “More than half of our respondents (52 percent) were worried about creating a stress risk assessment. Yet in reality this is not a particularly complex exercise, albeit it does require a regular and persistent focus to yield positive results.”
He added that the provider “would strongly encourage more employers to take the HSE regulations seriously”.
The provider highlighted two free resources that employers can use to create a compliant assessment:
