Dealing with stress is the challenge all employers must face. From office environments to conflict resolution and seminars on dealing with change, there is a spate of preventative measures companies can use to promote employee welfare. The sharp increase in stress related insurance cases should therefore act as a warning to employers, and encourage them to make their workplace less stressful. Perhaps the biggest incentive is the increase in employees taking their cases to industrial tribunals in the hope of wining thousands. Strangely enough while the number of mental illness claims have increased, those for physical injury have fallen.
People are now more likely to take time off work for a nervous breakdown than by breaking their leg.
At the start of the nineties the reverse was true. This results from the diligence with which employers have tackled workplace safety issues in the 1990 s. Employers now need to tackle the issue of stress in the workplace with similar gusto, to prevent this new problem from becoming an epidemic. Work doesn t have to be stressful. There is a way to reduce stress.