How I Use the Stress in the Workplace Template with Customers in Pilla
Stress is the health and safety risk most businesses know exists but do the least about. I've reviewed management systems in hundreds of operations, and the pattern is almost always the same: the written policy is there, the employee assistance programme is mentioned somewhere in the handbook, and the stress risk assessment either doesn't exist or was done three years ago and never revisited. Meanwhile, absence rates climb, good staff leave, and the managers closest to the problem have had no training on how to spot it or what to do about it.
The gap is rarely awareness. Most employers know stress is a problem. The gap is between knowing that and having something structured in place that actually works on a Wednesday afternoon when a team leader notices someone isn't coping. That's what this article is for. I'll walk you through what your stress policy needs to cover, give you a ready-made template you can edit for your own operation, and explain the bits that actually matter when an HSE inspector asks how you're managing psychosocial risk.
Key Takeaways
- What is stress in health and safety? Work-related stress is the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressure or demands placed on them. It's an organisational issue, not an individual weakness, and it sits alongside physical hazards as a risk that employers must assess and control
- Why do you need a stress policy? The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires employers to assess and control all risks to health, including work-related stress. An HSE inspector will check that you've done a stress risk assessment and have arrangements in place to support staff
- How do you set it up in Pilla? Use the knowledge hub template below, edit it to match your operation, and share it with your team through the app so everyone has access and you can track who's read it
- How do you automate the follow-up? Set up Poppi to chase staff who haven't acknowledged the policy and flag when it's due for review
Article Content
Understanding What's Required of You
Work-related stress is a health and safety risk. Not a soft HR issue, not a wellbeing perk. The Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 places a general duty on employers to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of their employees. The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 makes that specific: you must assess all risks to health, and that includes the risks arising from work-related stress.
The HSE defines stress as "the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressure or other types of demand placed on them. It arises when they worry that they can't cope." That distinction between pressure and stress matters. Pressure can be positive. It helps people meet deadlines and stay focused. Stress is what happens when pressure becomes excessive or goes on too long without recovery. The two feel different, and they need to be treated differently.
The HSE Management Standards cover six areas that drive work-related stress: demands, control, support, relationships, role, and change. If you've done stress risk assessments with the HSE framework, you'll recognise these. If you haven't, that's the first thing an HSE inspector will ask about. They want to see that you've identified the stressors in your workplace, consulted with your staff, and put controls in place. A written policy that sits in a folder isn't enough. They want evidence that the policy is being followed and reviewed.
I've worked with businesses where the stress policy was a copy-paste from a template pack bought online in 2016. Nobody had read it. Nobody had been trained on it. The employee assistance programme number printed on it had been disconnected for two years. That's not compliance. That's a liability waiting to surface, and in my experience it usually surfaces as a tribunal claim, not an inspection finding.
What makes stress different from most health and safety risks is that it's invisible until it isn't. You can see a wet floor. You can hear a faulty extractor. But a team leader who's been covering three roles for six months and hasn't slept properly since October looks fine in the morning meeting. Until they don't.
Setting It Up as a Knowledge Hub Entry
I've built a stress in the workplace template in Pilla covering the HSE definition of stress, management responsibilities, training requirements, stress risk assessment, employee consultation, confidential support arrangements, and monitoring. It gives you a structured starting point, but you need to edit it to reflect how your organisation actually works.
In the knowledge hub, create a new entry and tag it with "Health and Safety System". Use the same tag across all of your health and safety policies so they are grouped together and Poppi can track them as a set. Assign the entry to all teams so that everyone in the business can access it.
The template is designed to be edited, not just filed. Read through every section. Where it says "Company Name", replace it with yours. Where it refers to confidential counselling or occupational health services, name the actual provider your staff can contact. If your management training covers mental health first aid, say so. If it doesn't yet, that's a gap to close, but don't leave it in the policy as if you've already done it. An HSE inspector can tell the difference between a policy that describes what you do and one that describes what you wish you did.
26. Stress at Work Policy
Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 (as amended in 2003 and 2006)
Company Name in our commitment to protecting the health, safety and welfare of our employees, we recognise work-related stress as an organisational issue. Company Name acknowledges the requirement under the Management of Health, Safety and Welfare at Work Regulations, to assess and control the risks arising from work-related stress.
Definition of Stress
The Health and Safety Executive define stress as:
"The adverse reaction people have to excessive pressure or other types of demand placed on them. It arises when they worry that they can't cope"
This makes an important distinction between pressure, which can be a positive state if managed correctly, and stress, which can be detrimental to health.
Company Name to follow these safety arrangements which are written in keeping with the HSE guidance HSG218 - "Tackling work-related stress"
*Responsible Persons to consider and manage the issue of work-related stress.
Provide training for designated members of the management team, around stress risk assessment, stress awareness, and mental health first aid (which teaches ways to identify and manage stress in the workplace).
Conduct stress assessment to identify workplace stressors and provide suitable strategies to eliminate or minimise the risk of stress amongst the workforce.
Consult with employees on all issues around the development of our Stress Policy.
Ensure that the policy is adopted by all departments of the business and followed.
Provide training to all staff, following the successful implementation of the stress policy, so that employees know what to do if they suspect they, or a colleague, are suffering from stress.
Provide arrangements for confidential counselling or occupational health services and support.
Monitor and review our stress policy and risk assessment to ensure they remains fit for purpose and in line with our business undertakings and values.
* Responsible Persons identified on the House Responsibility Chart, are responsible for the implementation of our safety arrangements, to manage stress in the workplace.
This is a preview of the template. In Pilla, you can edit this to match your business.
What I'd want to see when reviewing this:
The definition section is the foundation. Staff need to understand the difference between pressure and stress before anything else in the policy makes sense. I'd want to see that you've kept the HSE definition word for word and that you've explained, in plain language, what it means for your team. Most people skim past definitions, so this one needs to land clearly.
The management responsibilities section should name the Responsible Persons by role, not just reference the responsibility chart. I'd want to see that training covers three things: stress risk assessment, stress awareness, and mental health first aid. If your designated managers haven't had that training, the policy is making promises you haven't kept.
The consultation section matters more than most businesses realise. The Regulations require you to consult with employees on health and safety matters, and stress policy is no exception. I'd want to see that employees had genuine input into the policy, not that it was written by one person and emailed out for "acknowledgement."
Common mistakes I see:
The biggest one is having a stress policy that treats stress as an individual problem. The policy talks about "support for struggling employees" instead of addressing the workplace factors that cause stress in the first place. The HSE Management Standards exist because stress is an organisational risk. If your policy only covers what to do after someone is already suffering, you've missed the point. The template includes stress risk assessment for exactly this reason.
The confidential support section often lists services that staff don't know how to access. I've seen policies that reference an employee assistance programme but don't include the phone number, don't explain that it's free, and don't make clear that using it won't show up on their personnel file. If your staff don't trust that the service is confidential, they won't use it. Spell it out.
The monitoring and review commitment is the section most likely to be ignored in practice. Businesses write "we will monitor and review our stress policy regularly" and then don't do it for three years. When the business changes, restructures, takes on more work, or loses key staff, the stress risk assessment needs revisiting. If you wrote it once and filed it, it's out of date.
Automate the Follow-Up with Poppi
Writing the policy is one thing. Making sure your team has actually read it is another. Poppi can handle the chasing so you don't have to.
If you mark the knowledge hub entry as mandatory, Poppi will track who's read it and who hasn't. You can set up automations to chase staff who are behind, notify managers when someone completes the policy, and get a regular report showing where the gaps are.
Here are three automations I'd set up for any knowledge hub policy:
Tom, you have 2 overdue policies to read and acknowledge
Overdue training reminders
Automatically chase team members who have mandatory policies they haven't read yet. Poppi sends the reminder so you don't have to.
Tom, you have 2 overdue policies to read and acknowledge
Emma has completed a mandatory policy
Video completion alerts
Get notified when a team member finishes reading or watching a policy, so you can track progress without chasing.
Emma has completed a mandatory policy
Training Report: 87% team completion. Tom and Sarah behind on 2 mandatory policies, due 3 days ago.
Training gap analysis
Get a regular AI report showing which team members are behind on mandatory policies and where the gaps are across your team.
Training Report: 87% team completion. Tom and Sarah behind on 2 mandatory policies, due 3 days ago.