Thinking aloud – a short commentary to prompt debate

Dedicated Stress Audits – a luxury we can no longer afford?

Nobody can doubt the importance of dealing with stressed individuals in the workplace. Wherever the source of pressures causing individual stress and organisational disfunctionality the need to improve harmony and corporate peak performance must be a high priority. Further this must be done based on evidence based investigation of the work environment and therefore structured stress audit is a vital tool to identify imbalance.

The current economic situation, which is likely to be with us for many years to come, reinforces the need to find ways to get the best out of all types of enterprise with a multiplicity of difficulties including stress.

Organisations who have invested in surveys and audits will be well aware that there is a limit to how much attention a workforce will commit to this type of essential investigative process. Realistically senior managers should not expect reliable results from staff who are too regularly bombarded with questionnaires. At the same time softer techniques often leave questions about the value of the material gathered as evidence and consequently proof of real change is problematic. To put this simply then, there needs to be a limit to survey activity which should be undertaken, yet the value of evidence from this method cannot be underestimated. The use of this process must therefore be carefully protected for the most important enquiries.

There are many factors that will influence the performance of the individual and organisation and they are often interrelated. In our stress audits many of us tend to go further than just the pressures identified by the HSE and look at impacts as well. Other factors in terms of for example ability, reputation, functionality, fitness for job and external circumstances tend to be left to other enquiries. Logistically to combine all areas fully would produce an impossible and unwelcome chore for respondents and the evidential value would decline accordingly. However to invest solely in a stress audit would leave the knowledge of other important factors to intuition or lower quality research methodology. Further overall interventions are unlikely to be integrated leaving several streams of activity competing for interest and resources, a stressor in its own right.

It is then easy to suggest that dedicated stress audits and indeed any other sole focus audit is a luxury we cannot afford if we want to make improvements over the widest range of problems without delay.

This does not however give us the option to do nothing nor to concentrate on our favourite issues so we can claim to be doing one thing well. Particularly for organisations struggling to survive or safeguarding themselves against an uncertain future there may be value in looking at other more flexible possibilities based perhaps on sequential targeting. This is nothing new but has been somewhat forgotten in our rush over recent years for technical and methodological excellence. It has also rarely been used across seemingly competing areas. Our own investigations have used the sequential targeting technique in combination with full enquiries with considerable success. The methodology offers considerable scope to the flexible enquirer with the ability to interpret and see the different opportunities in the datasets produced.

In most measurement instruments we have been looking at scales of items dropping from one academically sound theoretical model or another. What we tend to find is that most organisations have a portfolio of good and bad results and in fact without this motivation for change is difficult to encourage. Sequential targeting is about using simple pointers to show us the broad groupings but then only pursuing, in one integrated programme, those with greatest potential for improvement in individual and corporate terms. An organisations standard risk management process can be utilised to ensure fair assessment, prioritisation and board level engagement.

In conclusion we believe that we can no longer afford to focus on a small number of ‘branded’ tried and tested techniques. This does not mean however that we should not use robust methodology which is academically sound. In our organisational measurement activity we need to more carefully consider adopting a far more flexible yet integrated approach which will help organisations change more quickly and thrive based on uncluttered evidence.

David Bullivent June 2010