Work-related stress is a health and safety risk like any other, and the duty to assess it comes from the same regulation 3 that covers machinery and chemicals. What makes it different is that the hazard is the way work is designed and managed rather than a substance or a piece of equipment, so the assessment has to look at workload, control, support, relationships, role and change rather than at anything you can point at.
The six Management Standards
HSE's framework names six areas: demands, meaning workload, work patterns and the work environment; control, meaning how much say a person has in the way they do their work; support, meaning encouragement and resources from the organisation and colleagues; relationships, meaning conflict and unacceptable behaviour; role, meaning whether people understand their role and whether it conflicts; and change, meaning how organisational change is managed and communicated.
How the assessment is actually done
Not by a consultant walking round with a clipboard. The standard method is a survey of the workforce against the six areas, followed by discussion groups to find out what sits behind the scores, followed by an action plan owned by managers with dates. The discussion step is the one that gets cut and the one that produces the actionable findings, because the survey tells you where the problem is and only the conversation tells you what it is.
What the assessment has to produce
Specific changes to how work is organised, not an offer of resilience training. If demands score badly, the answer is workload, staffing, deadlines or the shift pattern. If control scores badly, the answer is decision latitude. Interventions aimed at helping individuals cope with an unchanged workload are the commonest response and the one with the weakest evidence behind it.
Individual assessments and the legal edge
Where a particular person is affected, an individual stress risk assessment is done with them, and it does two things: it identifies what can be changed, and it creates a record that the employer knew and responded. That record matters, because the point at which a foreseeable risk becomes a legal problem is the point at which the employer was on notice and did nothing.
Questions people ask about workplace stress risk assessment
Is an employer required to assess work-related stress?
Yes. Stress is a health risk arising from work, so it falls within the risk assessment duty in regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999.
What are the six HSE Management Standards?
Demands, control, support, relationships, role and change. They are the areas the assessment is structured around.
Can a stress risk assessment be done for one individual?
Yes, and it should be where a specific person is affected. It sits alongside the organisational assessment rather than replacing it.
Does resilience training discharge the duty?
No. Where the assessment shows the causes are in workload, control or support, the required response is to change those. Training individuals to cope is not a control for a hazard in work design.