Stress at Work

Tackling the causes and the common symptoms of work-related stress can help organisations:

• Improve well-being and organisational performance
• Comply with the UK legislation and meet the Health and Safety Executive's requirements

The Keil Centre's Chartered Psychologists are able to provide advice and assistance to organisations wanting to tackle stress at work. Their professional standards ensure the advice is tailored to your organisation, based on best practice and tested by experience. The Keil Centre psychologists have experience of a variety of stress-related projects, as well as being closely involved with he Health and Safety Executive's campaign to develop and implement Management Standards.

The Keil Centre also provides a wide-range of evidence-based services to suit the specific needs of organisations and individual clients. Our approach is to support organisations achieve a comprehensive approach to tackling stress, developing their in-house expertise and integrating with existing programmes and initiatives. The key building blocks of our approach are outlined below, though our interventions are always tailored to clients' requirements.

The building-blocks of tackling stress:

Organisations often feel unclear about what exactly stress is. Common questions asked are:

• Is stress always bad?
• What can I do if I feel stress?
• What do I do if a colleague feels stressed?
• What is the law regarding stress?

The Keil Centre has developed a wide range of activities that can help increase organisational understanding of stress. These have included:

Developing policy

• Helping organisations shape their approach to stress, well-being or stress-related absence
• Clarifying expectations of staff behaviour and of the managers' role and responsibilities
• Effective policies can be the backbone on which further work on stress can be built

   

  Increasing Staff Understanding
  

  
  
• Short seminars and talks to clarify what stress is and is not
• Content for intranet sites and company information packs to share this knowledge more broadly
  
  Effective understanding will lead to staff taking action sooner - early intervention is key for both the individual and the organisation.
  
  

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  Prevention - tackling causes  
  
  Prevention is the most effective form of intervention in the long-term. The Keil Centre assist organisations who want to take preventative action in a variety of ways, from choosing the most effective assessment method to helping develop and deliver improvement actions.
  
  Assessing stress - External consultants
  
  
• Design and delivery of tailored stress risk assessments
• Support with assessment and interpretation of HSE Indicator Tool
• Assistance using The Keil Centre's toolkit - StressTools www.stresstools.com
  
  Assessing stress - Developing In-house expertise
  
  Developing in-house expertise on risk assessments and effective interventions
  Training for in-house staff to use StressTools independently
  
  Taking effective action
  
  Assistance and support in making sense of existing stress risk assessment or audit data and turn this into effective actions.
  
  Three different projects delivered by The Keil Centre are listed as examples of best practice on the UK Health and Safety Executive's best practice database.
  
  o Click to view example 1
  o Click to view example 2
  o Click to view example 3
  
  A stress prevention project delivered by The Keil Centre for BP won a prestigious 2002 European Health and Safety Award. See pages 15-17 of the following European Health and Safety Agency publication for details.
  
  

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  Management - developing skill
  
  The Keil Centre's psychologists have extensive experience in developing of internal capability and competence in the field of stress management. The following are common interventions:
  
  Stress Competency
  Developing competency frameworks for stress to structure any training interventions
  
  Training for people-managers
  Skills-based training for managers, supervisors, HSE/ HR/ Occupational Health
  
  Developing copying and resilience for all staff
  Education and training in skills to recognise and cope with unavoidable stress
  Developing resilience, increasing copying strategies, using strengths to 'buffer' against stress
  
  Bespoke MasterClasses
  Advanced training for internal HSE, HR, Occupational Health and operational personnel, who are responsible for the design and execution of policy.
  
  

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  Treatment - professional support
  
  Professional assessment, treatment and counselling, including:
  
  
• Cognitive-behavioural Therapy (CBT) and counselling for a wide range of adult mental health problems
• Treatment for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) using Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR)
• Return to work assessment and support
• Medico-legal assessments and reports
  
  

For further information, please contact Ronny Lardner or Chiara Amati at The Keil Centre.