"More worrying, however, is that the position of stress has risen so sharply since last year. In the 2005 HSA and Employee Benefits survey, just 12 percent of respondents cited it as the main cause of workplace absence, positioning it in seventh place. This year, stress comes in at second place according to 37 percent of respondents - a rise of 25 percentage points," comments Suzanne Clarkson, head of corporate marketing at HSA. "Despite this, it is not clear that companies are necessarily implementing any form of strategy to deal with this. In fact, 68 percent of those surveyed had no policies in place to tackle stress in the workplace, and only 8 percent viewed stress as a reason to implement benefits.
"According to the ACAS[1] report published in 2005, stress is estimated to cause over 13 million sick days each year, and costs employers a staggering GBP3.7 billion. However, if stress related absence continues to rise at the rates demonstrated by this survey, we are likely to see the cost of it rising similarly."
Amanda Wilkinson, editor of Employee Benefits, says: "Stress has reared its head again as one of the major causes of sickness absence, therefore it makes sense to have a specific strategy to deal with the problem. Despite the high profile that stress often attracts, just under a third of respondents appear to have a strategy in place to help reduce it in the workplace. Of these, 84 percent use flexible working and work/life balance policies, and 83 percent counselling and Employee Assistance Programmes to help combat stress."
The survey also found the following results:
- Larger companies appear to have a bigger problem with stress than smaller ones, with only 25 percent of companies with less than 500 employees citing stress as a cause of absence compared to 51 percent of those with more than 500 employees.
- The public sector has the biggest stress problem with 74 percent of those responding from the public sector citing stress as a cause of sickness absence. However, it is also the most proactive sector with 61 percent claiming to have a stress prevention policy in place.
- The least proactive sector when it comes to stress is manufacturing, however this sector also demonstrated very low levels of stress-related absence.
This is the fourth year that HSA has sponsored the Employee Benefits Healthcare survey, which looks at many areas of workplace healthcare including sickness absence, cost of benefits and attitudes towards corporate healthcare and wellbeing. To see the full survey results visit www.employeebenefits.co.uk/research.
