Stress awareness day blues for UK companies

Employers will never crack the work-related stress conundrum unless they fully understand, and communicate to employees, the benefits of psychological health and wellbeing, says BUPA on National Stress Awareness Day.

Although stress is the number one cause of absence for non manual workers, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development's 2007 absence management survey, employers still allocate an average of around 95 percent of their healthcare budget towards measures to help improve the physical health of employees.

"This trend towards health and wellbeing programmes is encouraging but many of these initiatives still focus on exercise, diet and other health risk factors such as smoking," said Martyn Anthony, head of specialist services at BUPA Wellness.

"Psychological health, on the other hand, seems to be increasingly taking a back seat. The Health and Safety Executive highlighted the benefits of counselling services such as employee assistance programmes [EAPs] in helping to manage work-related stress. The benefits can be significant – for example, 63 percent of employees utilising BUPA's EAP have reported that the support provided by the service meant that they didn't end up taking any sick leave. Without the service, they said they probably would have had to take time off.

"The benefits of EAPs are slowly being recognised as more companies choose to invest in such services, but we have some way to go before we achieve the levels of utilisation seen in markets such as the US," added Martyn.

If recent research from Investors in People is anything to go by, it would seem that many employers are still failing to get the basics right. According to the findings, 30 percent of employees said that their employers think healthy working is either a wasted investment, a waste of time, nothing to do with them or that it doesn't mean anything. Furthermore, one in five employee respondents said their employer pays lip service to the health and wellbeing of employees at work or has no interest in promoting it.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the effect of this lack of action is that 30 percent of employees are either suffering from work-related stress or know someone who is suffering from work-related stress, potentially undermining productivity and performance.

"Although employers seem to recognise the importance of a healthy workplace, many are failing to get the basics right. Communication is key. Companies need to understand the health status of their employees and invest their healthcare spend accordingly to achieve a better balance between prevention and treatment. They also need to provide better support and development structures to employees by ensuring that managers understand the consequences of an unhealthy, unhappy workforce," said Martyn.

"BUPA's recent Positive Health initiative enables employees to benefit from confidential, online appraisal of their health and wellbeing, focusing on the four areas of health and wellbeing that are proven to impact on performance at work – namely nutrition, fitness, sleep and stress.

"Benefits to the employer include regular reports to help the organisation track trends in the health of its staff and develop meaningful prevention programmes, ultimately improving its performance. BUPA has also started providing its corporate customers with packs of health information which can be used in the workplace to help them promote the benefits of both physical and psychological wellbeing."

For further information, go to bupa.co.uk/positivehealth