Stress relief

Picture the scene... One of your senior employees, who regularly works long hours, is signed off work for two weeks. His Doctor’s Note suggests that he’s suffering from stress. On his return to security duties, he appears to have fully recovered and carries on working as usual. A month later, though, the same employee is signed off with severe depression, this time never to return. He’s too ill to work again, and successfully claims several hundred thousand pounds in compensation against the company because his illness was caused by stress at work.

That scenario is nowhere near as unlikely as it may at first appear. Indeed, surveys conducted by the Health and Safety Executive found that, in 2003-2004, over 500,000 people in Britain believed work-related stress was making them ill.

An employee will not win a stress claim in Court if you did not – and could not have been expected to – predict that work was likely to make him or her ill. Just because an employee is in a job which many people would think of as stressful does not automatically mean he or she is likely to become ill. As a general rule, security managers are entitled to assume that their members of staff can cope with the normal pressures of the job (unless, that is, you have reason to believe otherwise).

Tell-tale signs that might alert you to high stress levels among team members include:

• workloads being more than normal for a particular job – a marked increase in working hours might well be the indicator for this;
• an employee displaying uncharacteristic behaviour (such as irritability) and making careless mistakes;
• an employee who has had a previous absence for stress;
• abnormal levels of sickness or absenteeism in a particular job across your department.

The key is to be alert to possible causes for concern. Managers cannot expect to absolve themselves from blame simply by claiming that they didn’t realise there was a problem.

Handling stressed employees

If you have reason to believe that stress at work may be threatening an employee’s health and/or welfare, you must take reasonable steps to protect him or her from any risk (perhaps by redistributing work, or arranging for additional help and/or temporary cover). The lengths you are expected to go to depend on various factors, including how ill the employee is likely to become, the size of the business and its financial – and other – resources.

The interests of your other employees are also relevant. For example, it may not be reasonable to expect you to rearrange everyone’s work pattern for the sake of one employee if this could end up making the others ill. Security managers and directors have to strike a balance between the needs of the business and the employee’s best interests.

Information gathering is an important part of the process. You should consult the employee about the cause of their stress, and thereafter ascertain what might be done to improve the situation. If the employee is already ill, or has had a previous stress-related illness, it may be helpful to obtain information from their GP – and even a report from an independent doctor – to assess what action (if any) might help improve the employee’s condition or reduce the risk of a recurrence.

It’s up to the employee to decide whether to carry on in the same job or leave the company altogether. You are not expected to dismiss an employee to protect his or her health.

Prevention rather than cure

The Health and Safety Executive has produced ‘Management Standards’, a set of voluntary guidelines for employees to help them eliminate the most common causes of stress among the workforce. The ‘Management Standards’ identify six stress factors, in addition to the benchmarks that employers should aim to reach in relation to each.

There are various practical steps which security professionals can take to reduce the risk of stress among their employees. Regular and open appraisals, for example, should help to identify any problems employees might have with their workloads, or with their role in general, thereby allowing these issues to be identified at an early stage. Employees should be assessed objectively against realistic targets, and be clear on exactly the standards required of them.

‘Upward’ or ‘360 degree’ appraisals – wherein employees give feedback about their manager(s) – will allow them to raise any problems they might be experiencing with lack of support, or any other aspects of managerial back-up. Regular team meetings are also helpful in that they enable security managers to monitor workload levels and ensure the appropriate distribution of tasks.

Given that stress is often caused by how a person copes in the job itself, it is important to make sure – at the recruitment stage – that an individual’s skills are accurately matched to the demands of the role. Although training during employment might be helpful, if the person really isn’t suited to the role, there is a realistic limit to what can be done.

Increasing the control an employee has over their work may help to reduce stress. How much this is possible will partly depend upon seniority, but even for junior employees, the employer might have scope for more flexibility over how the work is done (for example in terms of hours worked and the number of breaks allocated). It may be helpful to include a stress policy in your staff handbook, explaining how stress is managed and stating who employees can speak to if they have any concerns. This should assist in identifying any issues at an early juncture.

With all of these steps, the real key is having an open atmosphere in which employees can raise concerns and discuss them, and where the employer is prepared to address those issues. A workplace in which an admission of difficulty in coping with a specific situation is seen as a weakness will be vulnerable.

Harassment and unfair dismissal

Imagine that, unbeknown to you, one of your employees has been harassing a colleague. The first you hear of it is when the harassed individual leaves, thereafter threatening the organisation with a legal claim. Will you be held responsible as their manager, even though you had no idea what was happening?

As an employer, you will usually be liable for your employees’ behaviour towards their colleagues at work, even if you are not aware of what they might have been doing. This could prove to be expensive. An employee who has been harassed at work has a number of potential claims, the main ones being unfair dismissal and discrimination. In the wake of a recent case, employees can also use the so-called ‘Stalkers’ Law’ to seek compensation.

An employee who has been harassed at work can resign and claim constructive dismissal. This means that he or she is treated as though you terminated the employment. The employee can claim compensation for the pay and benefits which he or she would have earned during the notice period. If they have worked for the organisation for at least a year, he or she can claim unfair dismissal.

Damages for unfair dismissal are calculated based on the time it would take the employee to find a new job and, by law, are capped at a maximum of £67,100.

It doesn’t matter if the victim of the harassment is only offended because he or she is particularly sensitive (although the more minor the conduct complained of, the more difficult it will be for the victim to prove that he or she was offended). In addition, harassment doesn’t need to be a course of conduct – a one-off incident can be enough if it’s serious.

If an employee is harassed on the grounds of his or her gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or age, or if he or she is sexually harassed, it amounts to discriminatory harassment. This allows the employee to claim unlimited compensation for any financial losses, as well as an additional amount (ranging from £500 to around £25,000) for injury to feelings.

The employee does not have to have been harassed in order to win a claim. For example, circulating sexist jokes throughout the office could amount to harassment of an employee who finds this offensive, even if the sender of the jokes did not intend to cause offence.

How to spot harassment

Examples of behaviour which has amounted to harassment include:

• a male employee viewing Internet pornography in the office which he subsequently shared with a female colleague;
• employees nicknaming a homosexual office manager ‘Sebastian’ after an effeminate character in a comedy series;
• a manager telling a female member of his team to wear a short skirt and see-through blouse specifically for a promotion interview.

As the employer, you will be liable for any harassment which takes place at work, and also at events which take place outside work but are connected with it (such as the Office Christmas Party). An employee can choose whether to claim against you, against the individual harasser or indeed both. You will be able to defend a harassment claim if you can show that you took ‘reasonable steps’ to prevent the harasser doing what he or she did.

The starting point is to show that you have an Equal Opportunities Policy in place and that you use it. You should also show that the harasser was aware of the policy and, ideally, received training in relation to its contents.

A harassed employee may have a claim under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 (originally introduced to deal with stalkers). Unlike discriminatory harassment, a one-off incident is not enough under this Act. Harassment must take place on at least two occasions, and must be directed at the victim.

Reducing risk in the workplace

Employers are advised to take several steps to reduce the risk of harassment in their workplace. For starters, they ought to implement equal opportunities and bullying/harassment policies.

They absolutely must ensure that all employees are aware of these policies (for example, by providing a copy to new employees when they join and circulating updates). Make it clear that any breach of the policies will be treated as a disciplinary offence.

In addition, security managers should train employees in the policies. Make sure that the policies are enforced consistently. If a breach is deliberately overlooked, this will suggest that you tolerate harassment.

Above all, perhaps, be alert to warning signs of possible problems – for example, an employee who behaves in a confrontational or aggressive manner, or an employee who makes inappropriate jokes – and take action to remedy the situation at an early stage.