Workplace Stress & Its Effect on Business Productivity - Research Paper Example

Protection for mentally disadvantaged people is afforded under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. The HSE found that workers in 2003/04 were citing stress as the reason for absence and this amounted to 5 million days off work. As a consequence company bosses were ordered in August 2004 to carry out risk assessments to gauge whether their staff is suffering from stress. The HSE is now targeting Public Sector employees and has already issued an enforcement notice in 2004 on the West Dorset Hospital NHS Trust where 1,100 staff are said to have had too little protection from stress.

Occupational stress statistics from a Self-reported Work-related illness household survey in 2001/02 (Jones, et. al 2003) indicated occupational groups from 2,000 standard occupational classifications with significantly higher rates of self-reported stress, depression or anxiety. These consist of the following professions: teaching professionals, protective service occupations, financial institution, office manager, public service and associated professionals, health associate professionals and in particular nurses, administrative occupations, government and related organizations; and functional managers This might help to explain why the public sector’s levels of absence, which includes The Rent Service (TRS), is higher than that of the private sector (Occupational Stress Statistics – Information Sheet 1/03/EMSU; HSE, 2003) In contrast to 2002 TRS, 04-05 figures indicate that staff took an average 8.

6 sick days which is a significant improvement in the previous year’s figure of 13.5 days, however, this still remains above the target levels set by the Government for the Civil Service [ x ]. One of the things that possibly encourage the view that stress is not a major issue in TRS is because there have been long periods of apparent calm judged.