Referral for Stress Risk Assessments

You might refer your employee for an individual stress risk assessment:

• As soon as you identify signs of negative work related stress or become aware that your employee has a health condition which elevates their stress risk.
• When your employee is scheduled to return to work from sickness absence due to a stress related condition.

Obvious signs of negative work related stress include:

• Your employee has raised a concern with you about work related stress (e.g., during a return to work meeting).
• You have a fit note advising that your employee is unfit for work with descriptions such as; stress related symptoms, anxiety disorder or work related stress.
• An occupational health assessment reports that your employee’s health and / or performance is being adversely affected by a range of work related stressors and recommends an individual stress risk assessment because;
  • there was insufficient time during the occupational health assessment to adequately assess them all and;
  • describing these stressors in the occupational health assessment report might appear overly critical of the organisation but describing them in a stress risk assessment report designed and structured specifically for this purpose will appear more balanced and objective whilst also having permission to appear critical, because it is the reason why the stress risk assessment was commissioned.

Less obvious signs, which you are reasonably expected to know about, might include an employee increasingly:

• Struggling to meet certain performance expectations such as; networking, speaking up in meetings, delivering presentations, managing customer or client relationships, adapting to or leading change, etc.
• Showing signs of low mood or agitation.
• Finding it difficult to communicate issues to you in an objective, deliberate and dispassionate way.

Why refer to Work Wellness?

• Work Wellness stress risk assessments are conducted by qualified and experienced Occupational Health Specialist Practitioners who:
• • Are more likely to identify workplace stressors:
    • Their independence helps overcome employee concerns about confidentiality.
    • Their experience of establishing trust and rapport, creates a “safe space” which encourages open and honest disclosure.
  • Can help maintain objectivity:
    • They have wide experience of “what good looks like” across many organisations so they can maintain a sense of proportion.
    • They are well versed in de-personalising sensitive and charged situations, employees are often thankful of the way in which we positively moderate their description of issues.
• Employing a credible third party is likely to increase commitment to the process and the likelihood that the resultant assessment is scrutinised and actioned.

Follow the flow chart below to decide how to request an individual stress risk assessment.  Basically:

• If any health information is likely to be declared or processed (which is likely if your employee has a long-term health condition) then request the assessment using the; occupational health assessment referral and employee consent forms.
• If you are confident that no health information is likely to be declared or processed then request the assessment using the much simpler work risk assessment referral form.

You complete the referral form, obtain your employee’s consent and email the form(s) back to us.

Returning the referral form in good time is crucial to the quality of the assessment:

The referral form must be returned to Work Wellness at least 5 working days prior to the stress risk assessment appointment to allow sufficient time to:

• Arrange the calendar appointment with your employee.
• Research and prepare for the stress risk assessment.

A stress risk assessment will normally:

• Be conducted remotely via video conference.
• Last for 60 minutes but we allow 90 minutes in our calendar in case we need to provide additional re-assurance and support for vulnerable / distressed employees.

We can arrange the stress risk assessment appointment directly with your employee.  We will provide them with candidate calendar slots, agree the slot most convenient to them, issue a calendar invite for the agreed slot and receive your employee’s acceptance of the invite.

Alternatively, you may choose to arrange the stress risk assessment appointment between Work Wellness and your employee, in which case we will typically offer you up to 3 candidate appointment slots to agree with your employee.  You may choose this option:

• In order to retain overall control over the process (e.g., to minimise the risk of ’employee did not attend’).
• For the first one or two referrals until you are comfortable with the process.

We will prepare in advance of the Stress Risk Assessment by;

• Reading through the information you have provided on the referral form, such as the circumstances and reasons for requesting the stress risk assessment.
• Preparing a starting set of questions to explore with your employee in order to elicit the information required by the stress risk assessment.

In the assessment consultation itself, our practitioner will:

1.    Identify the risks (stressors at work)

Our practitioner helps your employee to identify specific work related stressors by guiding them through 7 sources of workplace stress.  This structure has evolved out of:

• Several hundred individual employee mental health assessments.
• Over 20 years of conducting occupational health assessments and individual stress risk assessments.
• Over 20 years of managing talented, neurodiverse teams.

We recognise that this structure differs from the “Management Standards” recommended by the HSE but we’ve evolved this structure because it helps to:

• Structure the conversation without spoiling the natural flow of the conversation and the spontaneity of responses.
• Match each stressor to appropriate actions (turning a problem into a solution).

It’s not a problem if your employee describes a stressor which doesn’t naturally fit into the structure, as we describe the stressors anyway, we don’t just tick a series of boxes.

2.    Evaluate the significance of stressors

Our practitioner uses their experience of clinical tools for assessing the severity of stressors in a primary care environment to rate the severity of each stressor described by your employee as follows:

During this step our practitioner also offers guidance to your employee about how they might best discuss the assessment with you.  Where necessary our practitioner might need to; explain why the discussion is needed, provide encouragement and offer hints and tips for how to approach and input into the discussion.

After the assessment you will receive a report containing an assessment of possible stressors, which ones are temporary or lasting, and recommendations for reducing or mitigating them.

The report structure gives you space to document:

• Additional actions generated during your conversation with your employee.
• The reason why a recommended action has not been agreed and implemented.
• How an action is to be implemented (who, when, how, etc)

There should be no need to transpose parts of our report into another document (unless that’s something you want to do).

The report will more than likely contain sensitive information so we follow General Medical Council guidelines to ensure confidentiality.  Further details of these guidelines can be found on the Occupational Health Standards page in the section entitled “Data Protection, Confidentiality and Consent”. 

The report should be a valuable source of information to help you decide how to manage your employee, their performance and the risks to their health and safety.  It might form the basis of an action plan agreed between yourself and your employee.  See the Occupational Health Standards page for advice on “How to Use Your Occupational Health Assessment Report”. 

After following the action plan, work related stressors should have been controlled to levels which become tolerable for your employee, over a relatively short period of time; days, weeks, maybe up to a month or two.  However, if it becomes apparent that the action plan will not achieve this then more fundamental adjustments might be required including a change to the employee’s job or a referral to appropriate specialists to diagnose and prescribe treatment to help your employee cope.

You might also use the findings and recommendations in the stress risk assessment report to input into a review of your organisation’s policies, processes and support.  You will need to anonymise the report and redact all confidential health information prior to doing so.