The six HSE Management Standards for workplace stress, explained

Work-related stress is consistently one of the biggest causes of ill health at work in the UK, and it rarely arrives out of nowhere. It builds up through the way work is designed: how much is asked of people, how much say they have over their work, and how well they are supported when things get hard.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is the UK government body responsible for protecting people against risks to health and safety arising from work. Its Management Standards approach identifies six areas of work design that, when they are not properly managed, are associated with poor health and wellbeing, lower productivity and increased sickness absence. Understand those six areas and you have a practical, evidence-based structure for preventing workplace stress rather than reacting to it.

Why the standards matter

UK employers have a legal duty to protect employees from risks to their health, and that includes the risk of work-related stress. The Management Standards give organisations a recognised way to meet that duty: they describe what should be happening in each of the six areas, so you can compare your own workplace against a clear benchmark, identify the gaps and act before people become unwell.

They matter for managers day to day as well, because they provide a shared vocabulary. Saying "I think we have a Demands problem in this team" is more precise, and far easier to act on, than "everyone seems stressed".

The six standards

1. Demands

Demands covers workload, work patterns and the working environment. In a well-designed job, people have adequate and achievable demands matched to their skills, and the job itself sits within their capabilities. Persistent overload, impossible deadlines or a working environment that makes the work harder than it needs to be are all Demands problems.

2. Control

Control is about how much say a person has in how they do their work. Where possible, people should have control over their pace of work, be encouraged to use their initiative and develop new skills, and have a say over when they take breaks and how their working patterns are arranged. Low control is one of the most reliable predictors of work-related stress, especially when demands are high.

3. Support

Support means the encouragement, sponsorship and resources provided by the organisation, by line management and by colleagues. In a healthy workplace, policies and systems exist to support staff, people know what support is available and how to access it, and they receive regular, constructive feedback rather than silence punctuated by criticism.

4. Relationships

Relationships covers promoting positive working and dealing with unacceptable behaviour. The organisation should actively promote positive behaviour at work, have policies in place to prevent or resolve unacceptable behaviour such as bullying, and make it straightforward for staff to report problems when they arise.

5. Role

Role asks whether people understand their role and its boundaries. The requirements placed on an employee should be compatible with each other and clearly communicated, and there should be a route for raising conflicts or uncertainties about responsibilities. Two managers pulling one person in different directions is a classic Role failure.

6. Change

Change concerns how organisational change, large or small, is managed and communicated. People should receive timely information about change, be genuinely consulted rather than merely informed, understand the likely impact on their own job, and have support available during the transition.

A diagnostic lens, not a checklist

The standards are most useful when you apply them to ordinary working situations rather than treating them as abstract headings. Take a colleague who keeps missing deadlines and has gone unusually quiet in meetings. That pattern might reflect a Demands problem (an unrealistic workload), a Control problem (no say over how the work is done), a Support problem (nobody to ask for help), or some combination of the three. The standards prompt you to ask which area is under strain before you conclude that someone is underperforming, and the answer changes what you do next.

The areas also interact. Fixing a workload issue while leaving someone with no say over how the remaining work is organised addresses Demands but not Control, and the stress often persists. The most effective conversations tackle the standards together: agree what has to stop, and give the person a genuine voice in how the rest is arranged.

Putting the standards to work

Start by talking to people, because the standards describe experiences only your staff can report. The HSE approach pairs the six areas with structured assessment: individual staff members reflect on their own position against each standard, and managers or HR keep a record of the stress risks identified and the actions agreed. Small, specific changes, a workload conversation, clearer role boundaries, a proper consultation before a change lands, tend to move the needle more than broad wellbeing gestures.

Contains public sector information published by the Health and Safety Executive and licensed under the Open Government Licence.

Go deeper

Our Wellbeing at Work course puts the six standards to work properly: you will apply them to your own workplace, complete the individual and manager-level stress risk assessments they underpin, and build personal and team resilience alongside. If workplace wellbeing is on your desk this year, it is the course to start with.