Stress Management At Work

Business companies are becoming increasingly aware of the problems stress can cause their employees, and are looking at ways to deal with these.

Action on stress at work, we had outlines practical ways of reducing stress at work from an employer’s point of view, and gives an action plan for tackling stress at organizational level:

• Setting up an action group

• Assessing the current situation by means of a stress audit

• Tackling taboos

• Looking at stress-related factors like working days lost through sickness and strikes, accidents at work, excessive drinking and smoking in employees.

• Formulating, implementing and monitoring a stress policy

This can be work by companies stress counseling, using the in-house counseling scheme.

Many foundations and associations concerned with stress offer special facilities for handling it in the workplace. For example, the Yoga Health Foundation holds stress-management courses for the welfare officers of the various Civil Service departments at its residential centre in Bedfordshire.

Films and videos can be useful aids for getting the stress message across in a work context. Two such are Stress at Work, which looks at the experiences and ideas of people who have had to cope with too much work pressure, featuring interviews with a catering manager, secretary, bus mechanic, airline ticket clerk, social worker and shop steward: available from Concord Films, 201 Felixstowe Road, Ipswich, Suffolk, 1P39BJ. Tel. 0473 726012; and Stress: Recognizing the Causes, a video focusing on an industrial manager: available from Video Arts, 68 Oxford Street, London W1.

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