Page 754 - Xmo Strata - Bulletin Archive

Health, Safety & Environmental Bulletin No 274

17 November 2011

Proactively Managing Stress

Xmo Strata is tackling the issue of stress head on.

Stress is believed to be the UK’s number one cause of absence from work – but in addition to high
levels of absence it is also linked to high staff turnover and other indicators of organisational
underperformance.

If you look at it purely selfishly, from the viewpoint of the company and its customers, then stress is
about employees who are clinically sick underperforming and getting things wrong - that costs us all.

It is about the quality of the job, and about high levels of cost – which ultimately, of course, will be
passed on to customers in one way or another or the employer not surviving.

Enlightened companies – and I regard Xmo Strata as an enlightened company – also view the issue
from a more human perspective. And in that light, it is about taking corporate responsibility for
ensuring that the company does everything reasonably possible to ensure the wellbeing of its
employees and that benefits everyone.

We already do that – it’s why we’ve been so focused on health and safety since our inception.
Extending our health and safety policies to include a paid-for service, free to employees, is simply a
matter of encompassing modern thinking on this topic. All employees should now have the counselors’
contact details.

As a result, a service has been introduced to employees with the objective of spotting signs of stress
early, and dealing with them, before harm comes to the individual and before it begins to affect the
calibre and quality of work.

Essentially, the service which the company is committed to provides free stress counselling and the
opportunity for individuals to talk to trained professionals about their work, and personal stress. The
service is provided by a third party and is totally confidential – there is no reporting back to the
company.

Professionals working in the field define stress as “the reaction some people have to situations where
the workload exceeds the person’s ability and capacity to cope.”

But this should not be a cause for judging individuals: we all experience stress, of different types, and
how it affects us can be influenced by a multitude of factors.

For health and safety professionals, stress has one potentially deadly effect: it increases the chance of
human error.