Do you see stress as a good or bad thing?

Stress is actually a personal response and byproduct to external pressures. Individuals tolerate / respond to pressure differently, with a number of contributing factors, and not all stress comes from work-related issues.

That's going to be a complex tool, and even more complex to analyse and utilise the data collected.

E.g. How do you account for individual variances in resilience to stressors? How do you assess how much stress is work-related versus personal? Where is the line drawn with regard to the organisation's responsibility for worker stress where is it not directly caused by work? What if personal stress is exacerbated by work, but not caused by it? How do you measure stress accurately? And so on...

Hi Rob, have you read the Government Health and Safety Lead produced document - A Guide for Maintaining Health and Wellbeing?

There are some great tools in the book for dealing with stress which may be of use.

As everyone reacts to stress differently, my suggestion would be to conduct an audit or get participants to conduct a self-assessment using the tools in the document above. This will give you a baseline, then you can conduct the same self-asessment on a regular basis which should help you determine whether the stress levels are getting better or worse. Keeping in mind that the self-assessment is 'a point in time' so you would want participants to complete the self-assessment when they are feeling 'normal', not on high stress days.

I hope that helps.

Thanks
Sharyn

Both actually, we need to be able to maintain a balance.

Thanks for the feedback and responses.

I agree with the comments provided, stress is both good and bad and comes from a range of situations etc. some work, some non-work. What I believe is the key is understanding the impact upon workers and their ability to do the work, herein lies the challenge. But I firmly believe, and it relates back to the WorkSafe material regarding understanding the effect of work on Health and Health on Work.

To quote a character from the movie "Platoon" who says "if you free your mind then your ass will follow" a concept which flows into the MHF's 5 ways of working program. all this means, I believe, is that we need a multi pronged approach to this issue of "stress", but as an employer if you understand what causes the stress for your staff then you are better able to develop processes, procedures, systems and support for your staff to enable them to have a successful and fulfilling working life and that goes a long way to developing a culture where Health Safety and Wellbeing is BAU.

Nga Mihi
Rob

Given the dearth of available tools, a useful starting point may well be the wellbeing self-assessment used by Dr Keith Hammond as part of his Industry:Fit programmes. It will at least allow you to develop a 'heat map' of where people are at, then you can periodically survey people again.

I also think there is enormous potential to develop diagnostics from the AVI Values Inventory Leadership Development report, which uses an elegantly simple questionnaire to provide a wealth of information that a trained consultant can use to identify issues such as stress. In addition, the consultant can consolidate individual AVI results to provide insights into groups / teams and the entire organisation. I don't know if anyone has yet identified this potential for the AVI Values Inventory, but you can find out more from www.minessence.net

This may not be exactly what you're after @Rob McAulay, however check out the HSE's Management Standards Approach (Very unusual title). I've also added a spreadsheet tool that I built (not claiming that its any good) and used to analysis in a number of different ways.

Happy to discuss further if you'd like to hear how i used it and what worked and the limitations.

Our company has provided the Resilience App to all employees via our cell phones. The Resilience Diagnostic assessment is a great starting point, supported with a goal tracker, meditations and resilience training videos. The objective of the app and sharing aspects of it in staff meetings is to help individuals bounce, grow, connect and flow. It opens up healthy conversations :)

Hi Mandy, your Resilience App is it written specifically for you, if not can you please share the link.

my Personal motto is; There is no such thing as Stress, it is called mentally Challenged" and being Maori, I love a good challenge, does that make me stressed, i dont think a program or questionnaire would work for me.

Sandra,
The Resilience Institute is a multidisciplinary team of professionals. It was founded in NZ and is headquartered in Switzerland so please Google them.
Their app can be tailored to employer's needs if required. In our case they provide summaries of anything from staff activity to our general organisational health diagnostic. The latter can be broken up by teams of staff so one can get a feel for how different areas of operations or work teams are coping.

Hi Rob,
Could try a quick and easy Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10).
That's a quick one