Work-related stress is a health and safety risk. It sits under the same duties as noise, dust and machinery, and it must be assessed in the same way.
That framing matters, because most organisations file stress under HR or wellbeing — and once it is there, it becomes a question of how individuals cope rather than how the work is designed. The law asks the opposite question.
Where does stress sit in your organisation?
This usually determines whether it is being managed at all
Why this is a health and safety duty
Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 places a duty on every employer "to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare at work of all his employees."
Health means health. It has never been limited to physical health, and the HSE has treated work-related stress as a health risk for decades.
Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to the health of employees. Where the work is capable of causing harm through sustained pressure, that risk falls within the assessment like any other.
Work-related stress, depression and anxiety account for around half of all work-related ill health in Great Britain. On volume alone it is one of the largest health and safety issues most employers have — and one of the least likely to appear in their risk assessment.
The six Management Standards
The HSE's approach breaks the work down into six areas where poor design causes harm. This is guidance rather than law — but it is the method the HSE uses, and an assessment built around it is one you can defend.
The six areas to assess
| Standard | The question it asks | What poor design looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Demands | Can people cope with the workload, patterns and environment? | Chronic overload, impossible deadlines, no let-up |
| Control | How much say do people have in how they work? | Micromanagement, no discretion over pace or method |
| Support | Is there encouragement, resourcing and backing from managers and colleagues? | No supervision, no training, nowhere to raise problems |
| Relationships | Is conflict dealt with, and unacceptable behaviour addressed? | Bullying tolerated, conflict left to fester |
| Role | Do people understand their role, and are the demands on it compatible? | Conflicting instructions, unclear boundaries |
| Change | Is organisational change communicated and managed? | Announcements without consultation, prolonged uncertainty |
HSG218, Managing the Causes of Work-Related Stress, has been superseded by HSE's step-by-step workbook, but the Management Standards approach it described remains HSE's current method. See our page on HSG218 and what replaced it.
How to assess a hazard that is the work itself
This is what makes stress harder than a physical risk. You cannot measure it with an instrument, and the hazard is not a substance or a machine — it is how the work is organised.
The five steps still apply:
- Identify the hazards. Use the six standards as your framework. Which parts of the work create sustained pressure?
- Decide who might be harmed. Whole teams, roles or shifts — not named individuals. Look at where demand concentrates.
- Evaluate and decide on controls. Can the demand be reduced, the discretion increased, the support resourced?
- Record the significant findings. Required in writing if you employ five or more people.
- Review. Restructures, new systems and departures all change the picture.
Assess the work, not the workforce. A stress assessment that concludes some employees are less resilient than others has assessed the wrong thing — and if that reasoning ever appears in writing, it will read badly to anyone examining it later.
Where the evidence comes from
You already hold most of it:
- Sickness absence patterns, particularly short-notice absence concentrated in one team
- Turnover and exit interviews
- Grievances, and informal complaints that never became grievances
- Staff survey results, where you have them
- What managers report about workload and deadlines
- Simply asking — a properly run conversation with a team beats a survey with a low response rate
Where the duty stops
This matters as much as where it starts, and vague guidance helps nobody.
Your duty is to the risks arising from the work. You control workload, deadlines, staffing, how change is handled and whether managers are trained. You do not control bereavement, family illness, financial pressure or a person's health history — and you are not expected to.
Within the duty
- •Workload and deadlines you set
- •How much discretion the job allows
- •Supervision, training and resourcing
- •Bullying and conflict at work
- •How change is communicated and managed
- •Adjusting work where you know someone is struggling
Outside the duty
- •Pressures originating outside work
- •Diagnosing or treating anyone
- •A person's health history
- •Guaranteeing nobody ever feels stressed
- •Removing all pressure from a job
- •Responsibility for a risk you had no way of knowing about
The practical test in most cases is foreseeability. Where an employer knew, or ought reasonably to have known, that the work was causing harm and did nothing, the position is very different from one where nothing was raised and nothing was apparent. That is the strongest argument for having the assessment and acting on what it shows.
Stress and mental health are not the same duty
They overlap, but they come from different law, and conflating them causes mistakes in both directions.
Work-related stress is a health and safety risk. You assess it and reduce it, and it applies to the whole workforce.
A mental health condition may be a disability under the Equality Act 2010. Section 6 defines disability as a physical or mental impairment with a substantial and long-term adverse effect on the ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities. Where that applies, the duty to make reasonable adjustments is triggered — and it is individual, not organisational.
The two duties run in parallel. Reducing workload across a team is stress management. Adjusting one person's hours or duties because of a condition is a reasonable adjustment. Doing the first does not discharge the second, and doing the second for one person does not address a team-wide problem.
You are not expected to diagnose anyone. Where a condition may be involved, that is a matter for occupational health advice — and you are entitled to a view on fitness for work, not the clinical detail behind it.
What good looks like in practice
- Stress appears in the risk assessment as a named risk with controls, not as a wellbeing paragraph in the policy
- Managers are trained to spot workload problems and have authority to act on them
- People can raise pressure before it becomes absence, and doing so is not career-limiting
- Return-to-work conversations after stress absence ask what about the work needs to change
- Wellbeing provision exists alongside the assessment rather than instead of it
Employee assistance programmes are worth having. They are support for people under pressure, not a control for the pressure — and they should not be the only thing an organisation can point to.
Common mistakes
Filing it under HR. It is a risk assessment matter. Wellbeing initiatives sit alongside that duty, not in place of it.
Assessing individuals rather than the work. Resilience training does not reduce a workload that is genuinely too high.
Treating a survey as the assessment. A survey is evidence. The assessment is what you conclude and what you change.
Waiting for someone to go off sick. By then the harm has happened and the foreseeability question has already been answered.
Confusing it with the Equality Act duty. Reasonable adjustments for an individual and stress risk assessment for the organisation are separate obligations.
Where this fits
See occupational health for how stress sits alongside noise, vibration and substance exposure, and safety management for the consultation and review arrangements this depends on. The underlying assessment duty is covered in risk assessment.