We conducted a short stress survey at the end of last year, inviting feedback from public sector organisations in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I wanted to get an idea of attitudes towards and approaches to dealing with work-related stress across organisations. How pro-active were they in promoting wellbeing, and dealing with stress if it did occur? There were just 4 questions in the survey, and of those who responded, the results were as follows:

Q 1) Does the organisation have a stress policy?

Whether or not 'stress' is an issue for your organisation, its a good idea to know what other companies are doing, getting examples of what is good practice for promoting wellbeing, preventing stress and dealing with it if it does occur. It makes good business sense to do this, but employers have a legal responsibility too to assess and then control the risks of work-related stress, quite apart from the duty of care employers have towards staff. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) Management Standards are just such an example of best practice in this area. These Standards provide a benchmark for the manager/organisation to test how well they are doing in relation to the six risk factors the HSE Has identified as potential hazards both for the individual and the place of work. These risk factors are as follows:

Demands - includes workload, work pattern and the work environment

Control - how much say the person has in the way they do their work 

Support - includes the encouragement, sponsorship and resources provided by line management, the organisation, colleagues

Relationships - includes promoting positive working to avoid conflict and dealing with unacceptable behaviour

Role - whether people understand their role within the organisation and if the organisation ensures they don't have conflicting roles

Change - how organisational change-large or small-is managed and communicated

These are fairly straightforward measures that we can use to check on how well we're doing to promote wellbeing for our staff, and prevent and manage stress if its become a problem. As an individual too its good to know what you can expect from your manager in each of these areas. The HSE website provides examples of specific interventions and activities under each of the headings, with the focus on maintaining a process of continuous improvement and monitoring and reviewing whether theres' anything we can do better to improve or enhance the working conditions and environment we work in. If we're doing this, we're more likely to have an engaged, effective and productive workforce.   

It seems to me from my client work and experience of stress management generally that, other things being equal, if we CAN accept ourselves, this can go a long way to establishing and maintaining our psychological wellbeing. It can help us to keep cool about situations and be calm about life in general. Accepting ourselves is a good start to preventing stress occurring, as it then becomes easier to accept and deal with others and what happens to me and how things work out (for better or for worse). It can also lead to our being more effective and 'successful', as we're better able in these circumstances to feel and function well, without the negative symptoms that stress brings with it. It will also help us to deal with adversity or when things don't work out the way we planned. Self-acceptance involves us feeling okay about who we are and what we're like. It gives us permission to foul up now and then, and not to feel bad about it. If we do make a mistake, we can say to ourselves 'That went wrong, it won't be like that next time', or something similar. It requires us to be flexible, and not rigid about what's going to happen, and when it's going to happen. This doesn't mean that we lower our standards, or have lesser aspirations than others, just that our expectations are realistic and reasonable, and not tied to someone or something we have little or no control over. Nor is this a charter encouraging you to avoid responsibility for everything and anything, rather it aims to

- encourage self-confidence  

- stop us being overly self-critical, or beating ourselves up when things don't go the way we planned

- help us to feel okay about ourselves, others and 'the world'

- help us move on and move forward, and not dwell on what should be happening/might have happened/should have happened etc