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The business case
Preventing employee stress is an important business strategy for many reasons.
- Several regions in Canada now cover workers' compensation claims for chronic mental stress. This goes beyond covering traumatic stress alone. It’s likely more regions may follow.
- Chronic mental stress is a recognized occupational health and safety hazard.
- Stress can deplete the individual’s capacity for resilience and their ability to cope with work stressors.
- Stress can result in emotional or relational problems, depression, anxiety, or performance issues.
- Chronic mental stress occurs when an individual's exposed to ongoing stressors without relief.
- Environmental, social, and governance goals (ESG) are increasingly important for shareholders and investors. Prioritizing the psychological health and safety of workers aligns with the “Social” component of ESG.
All of the above can result in costs to the organization related to absenteeism, disability, turnover and productivity.
While the employer can’t take responsibility for personal or family stressors, by managing work-related stress, the overall impact of stress is lessened. Recognizing work-related stressors and the impact they can have on employees allows organizations to take appropriate action before the stress causes disability.
Identify
- This Employee stress prevention checklist | PDF is adapted from Elizabeth Rankin-Horvath's work on preventing and managing chronic mental stress claims. The checklist facilitates a discussion about indicators of work stress, potential work stressors and next steps. It provides a useful starting point.
Other ways to identify and prevent work-related stress can include:
- Help every leader to understand how they can recognize and address stress for their teams.
- Employee workload stress provides many strategies, even if the stress is not primarily from workload.
- Listen to what employees say and how they say it to help you identify sources of stress in your organization. This could be done formally through focus groups, or casually by members of the staff.
- Are employees expressing concerns about their stress load?
- Are they upset, angry, irritable, or apathetic?
- Are they complaining about burnout?
- Are they chronically fatigued?
- Has there been a noticeable change in an employee’s attitude or behaviour?
- Is the organization experiencing any significant changes that could impact the employees’ job security?
- Some sample questions for leaders to ask during a one-on-one conversation | PDF with employees could help them monitor stress levels.
- Is there unresolved conflict between workers?
- Conflict response for leaders can help improve effectiveness of the conflict resolution process.
- Are there signs or reports of harassment or bullying?
- Harassment and bullying prevention can help develop the refinement of a process to address and prevent these behaviours.
- Are there signs of chronic mental stress showing up in recent employee surveys?
- Some assessments that you could use include:
- Monitor and review any unexplained increases in:
- Turnover
- Sick time
- Performance issues
- Accidents or injuries
- Employee complaints
Reduce the risk
Stress is inevitable, but with the right tools and strategies you can support employees to manage most work stress and prevent it from becoming chronic. Some foundational strategies include:
- Employee workload stress
When employees struggle with workload stress, it’s important to focus on easing the stress rather than just lowering the quantity of work, especially when they’re only working regular hours. - Discrimination prevention and inclusion
Address discrimination and promote inclusion through your policies and processes. You’ll help create a positive environment that supports all employees to thrive and succeed. - Harassment and bullying prevention
Learn how to develop policy, processes and training to address and eliminate harassment in the workplace. This resource provides practical considerations and strategies for addressing bullying. - Hiring, orientation and termination
Throughout the employment life cycle, there are opportunities to protect psychological health and safety while meeting organizational goals and objectives. This includes considering accessibility, inclusion and equity. These tips and strategies can help. - Helping employees to manage change can help leaders support employees dealing with organizational changes that may have an unsettling impact. Through thoughtful planning, effective communication, and engaging employees you can improve psychological safety through times of change.
- Trauma in organizations
Help prepare leaders and employees to respond to traumatic incidents at work. Planning ahead can help reduce negative mental health effects. - Psychological health and safety policy recommendations
This framework provides policy recommendations for potential impacts on psychological health and safety. It covers policy, planning, implementation, evaluation and review.
Preventing employee stress involves listening to employees. It means supporting and resourcing leaders to manage changes in work demands, workflows and staffing in a way that minimizes negative impacts. And it also requires updating policies and procedures to improve work conditions. It is a process of continual improvement, but one that can deliver big benefits to any organization.
Share this page with any leader trying to prevent or reduce work stress for employees.
Additional resources
- Chronic Mental Stress. Ontario's Workplace Safety and Insurance Board has introduced coverage for chronic mental stress. This resource explains why and how chronic mental health claims get paid.
- Is your organization at risk for burnout? | PDF. This tool helps you assess your organization’s response to work-related stress.
- Psychological health and safety policy recommendations.. This framework provides policy recommendations for potential impacts on psychological health and safety. It covers policy, planning, implementation, evaluation and review.
- Plan for resilience can be facilitated by a leader to their employees to help them manage current stressors they’re dealing with. It provides employees with healthy strategies to prevent chronic stress, and practical strategies they can leverage to address stressors they’re experiencing.
- Name, claim and reframe is a resource leaders can facilitate to employees to help them recognize when they’re having a stress response, question the power they’ve given the stressor, and consider ways they can manage the situation to support their well-being.
- Managing stress. Use these strategies to help manage stress and protect well-being.