About Workplace Mental Health
Ask most managers whether they have done a risk assessment for the obvious physical hazards, the trailing cables, the heavy lifting, the working at height, and they will say yes. Ask them whether they have done a stress risk assessment, and you often get a blank look. Yet work-related stress is now the single largest cause of work-related ill health in Great Britain, and a stress risk assessment is the most practical tool we have for getting ahead of it. Having spent a quarter of a century at the Health and Safety Executive developing this approach, let me explain how to do one properly.
Why a stress risk assessment matters
The case for doing this is not abstract. The Health and Safety Executive’s most recent figures, for 2024/25, show 964,000 workers suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety, with 22.1 million working days lost as a result. Stress, depression and anxiety now account for more than half of all work-related ill health and 62% of all working days lost to it. The cost lands on employers too; Deloitte puts the annual cost of poor mental health to UK employers at around £51 billion, much of it driven by people who turn up but cannot work at their best. A stress risk assessment is not box-ticking. It is how you find the causes before they turn into absence, turnover and lost performance.
Start with the six causes of work-related stress
The HSE Management Standards, which I helped to develop, set out six areas where work commonly goes wrong. The first is demands, meaning workload, work patterns and the working environment. The second is control, or how much say people have over the way they do their work. The third is support, the encouragement and resources provided by the organisation and line managers. The fourth is relationships, which covers promoting positive working and dealing with conflict and unacceptable behaviour. The fifth is role, whether people understand their role and are not given conflicting demands. The sixth is change, and how organisational change is managed and communicated. A good stress risk assessment works through these six areas systematically, rather than relying on a vague sense that people seem stretched.
The steps of a stress risk assessment
The method mirrors any other risk assessment. First, identify the hazards: gather the evidence you already hold, sickness absence, turnover, exit interviews and staff survey results, and then talk to people. Second, decide who might be harmed and how, paying attention to teams or roles under particular pressure. Third, evaluate the risks and decide on proportionate action across those six areas. Fourth, record what you find and what you will do, because a stress risk assessment that lives only in someone’s head is not an assessment. Fifth, review it, because demands and structures change over time. The HSE provides a free indicator tool and templates that many organisations use as a starting point, and there is no need to over-engineer it.
Who should be involved
This is where stress risk assessments succeed or fail. The people doing the work know where the pressure sits, so they have to be involved, through surveys, focus groups or honest team conversations. Managers need to take part because so many of the controls sit with them. And leaders need to own the outcome, because some of what surfaces, unrealistic targets, under-resourcing, poor change management, can only be fixed at their level. A stress risk assessment done to people rather than with them rarely tells you the truth.
Turning the assessment into action
The assessment is the easy part. What separates a genuine stress risk assessment from a paper exercise is what you change as a result. If demands are the problem, that might mean re-prioritising work or adding resource. If control is the issue, it might mean giving teams more say over how they work. The test I put to leaders is simple: six months on, can you point to something specific that is different because of what the assessment told you? If the answer is nothing, the assessment was theatre. This work also forms the backbone of alignment with ISO 45003, the global standard for psychological health and safety at work, which builds on exactly this kind of risk-based thinking. You can see how we approach it on our ISO 45003 gap analysis page, and our post on what real interventions look like goes further on turning insight into action.
Stress risk assessment frequently asked questions
Is a stress risk assessment a legal requirement in the UK?
In effect, yes. Employers have a legal duty under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations to assess significant risks to employees’ health, and the HSE is clear that this includes the risk of work-related stress. A documented stress risk assessment is the clearest way to show you are meeting that duty.
How often should you review a stress risk assessment?
At least once a year, and sooner if something significant changes, a restructure, a merger, a spike in absence, or new pressure on a particular team. Stress risk is not static, so the assessment cannot be either.
Where to start
If your organisation has never done a proper stress risk assessment, or has one that has quietly gone stale, that is a good place to begin. It costs little, it is rooted in law and evidence, and it tells you where the real pressure lies. If you would like help designing or reviewing yours, get in touch at being-real.co.uk.
About Peter Kelly and Being Real
Peter Kelly is an organisational psychologist with a quarter of a century at the Health and Safety Executive, where he developed the UK’s management standards approach to work-related stress and shaped national policy on workplace mental health. He sat on the drafting panel for ISO 45003, the global standard for psychological health and safety at work. Being Real helps organisations move from policy to practice. To talk to Peter, visit being-real.co.uk.