About Workplace Mental Health
The HSE Management Standards are, in my view, still the most practical framework any UK employer has for tackling work-related stress at its source. I say that with a particular interest, because I spent more than twenty years at the Health and Safety Executive, and I was part of the team that developed the management standards approach in the first place. So I have watched what happens when organisations use them well, and what happens when they ignore them. With work-related stress, depression and anxiety still accounting for around half of all work-related ill health in the UK, and 964,000 workers affected in 2024 to 2025 according to HSE figures, a record high, the case for using a proven framework has never been stronger.
What the HSE Management Standards are
The HSE Management Standards cover six areas of work design that, if not managed well, are associated with poor health, lower productivity and increased sickness absence. They are not a campaign or a slogan. They are a way of treating stress like any other workplace risk: identify the hazard, assess who might be harmed, and put proportionate controls in place. The six areas are demands, control, support, relationships, role and change. Get those right and you remove much of what makes work harmful in the first place.
The thinking behind them is simple but easy to forget. Stress at work is rarely about individuals being fragile. It is usually about how the work itself is organised. That is why the standards focus on the conditions of work rather than on fixing people, and why they sit so comfortably alongside ISO 45003, the global standard for psychological health and safety at work, which builds on exactly this logic.
The six areas of the HSE Management Standards
Demands is about workload, work patterns and the working environment. The question is whether people can cope with what is asked of them within the hours they have. Control is about how much say people have over the way they do their work. People who can influence the pace and method of their work cope far better with pressure than those who cannot. Support covers the encouragement, sponsorship and resources provided by the organisation and by line managers; it is often the difference between a hard week and a harmful one.
Relationships is about promoting positive working and dealing with unacceptable behaviour such as bullying and conflict. Role is about whether people understand what is expected of them and whether the organisation avoids giving them conflicting demands. Change is about how organisational change, large or small, is managed and communicated. Anyone who has been through a badly handled restructure knows how much damage poor change management does to mental health. Read together, the six areas are a checklist for designing work that people can actually sustain.
How to use the HSE Management Standards in practice
The standards come with a recognised process, and it works best when you follow it properly rather than cherry-picking the comfortable parts. Start by understanding the issues in your organisation, often using the HSE indicator tool, which is a validated survey that scores you against each of the six areas. Then bring people together to make sense of the results, because the data tells you where to look but your employees tell you why. From there, agree practical actions, record them, and review whether they have worked. It is a continuous cycle, not a one-off exercise.
The common mistake is to run the survey, file the report, and change nothing. People notice. Asking employees how they are and then doing nothing is worse than not asking, because it teaches them that speaking up is pointless. So commit to acting before you measure. If you want to see how a stress risk assessment built on these standards looks step by step, and how it connects to a wider plan, our writing on what real interventions into workplace mental health look like takes the argument further.
Finally, treat the HSE Management Standards as a foundation rather than a ceiling. They give you a sound, evidence-based way to manage work-related stress, and they map neatly onto the psychosocial risk requirements of ISO 45003. For most organisations, mastering the six areas is the single most valuable thing they can do for the mental health of their people.
Frequently asked questions
What are the HSE Management Standards?
The HSE Management Standards are a framework from the Health and Safety Executive for managing the causes of work-related stress. They cover six areas of work design: demands, control, support, relationships, role and change. Managing these areas well reduces stress at its source rather than treating it after the fact.
Are the HSE Management Standards a legal requirement?
The HSE Management Standards themselves are guidance, but employers in the UK do have a legal duty to assess and control the risks from work-related stress under health and safety law. The standards are the recognised, practical way to meet that duty, which is why so many organisations use them.
If you want help turning the six areas into a working system, our strategic workplace mental health advisory and our ISO 45003 gap analysis can show you where to start and what to prioritise. Get in touch at being-real.co.uk.
About Peter Kelly and Being Real
Peter Kelly is an occupational psychologist with more than twenty years at the Health and Safety Executive, where he helped develop the management standards approach to work-related stress and shaped national policy on psychological health at work. 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 on workplace mental health, from stress risk assessment to ISO 45003 gap analysis and suicide prevention. You can contact the team at being-real.co.uk.