Samaritans to cut workplace stress

A third of UK workers cannot get to sleep at night through anxiety - and three- quarters cannot ’switch off’ when they leave their office.

Samaritans releases these findings today to coincide with roadshows to launch its WorkLife training to help HR professionals and managers cope better with stress and emotional issues in the workplace.

Samaritans’ unique new training courses will help managers and teams tackle the causes of stress in the workplace. WorkLife is being fully funded by Royal & SunAlliance as part of their corporate social responsibility initiatives.

Road Shows
The series of eight free road shows - launching in Edinburgh on May 3rd - will give businesses a taster of what the training involves and will highlight the unique practical skills Samaritans provides for managers or team members, to deal with stress related difficulties in the workplace.

Samaritans’ training includes aspects of their ’active listening skills’ which are uniquely used by trained Samaritans volunteers and have now been adapted for use within the workplace. The courses use a series of fictional characters to enable participants to explore challenging work situations without having to disclose their own experiences.

The Samaritans research survey carried out via the internet by Tickbox.net put a series of questions to 1500 employed people aged 16 years and above.

’Easy to approach managers’
When they were asked what contributed to a good working environment, the top factor selected was ’having management staff who were easy to approach’ which polled at 81%.

The next highest factor was ’flexible working’ at 74.7%. However, in the North East - the only area in the country which answered this way - this was turned around as flexible working was the most important factor at 82.8 % against 79.3% for approachable management.

The Scottish came out top when it came to preferring to have the radio playing in the background at work - giving it a rating of 34.5%!

Sales, marketing and media professionals unsurprisingly put having a relaxed dress code as a 52.2% preference for a good work environment while this only rated 29.5% for the finance sector. And the sales, marketing and media men and women saw an active social scene as important at 53.7 % while the healthcare workers only rated it at 29.8%.

Samaritans WorkLife training, with its use of listening skills in particular is aimed to reduce the potential for tension and stress within the workplace. WorkLife will complement the existing communications skills courses that are already delivered by the emotional support charity. There are two purpose designed WorkLife courses - one for managers and another for managers and team members together.

Samaritans’ internet survey asked which qualities staff felt were important in their managers.

The right to a work:life balance
The top response at 80% was that managers respected the staff’s right to having a work:life balance. The next, at 77% was that a manager should be able to spot when a member of staff needs support. This is a crucial element of WorkLife training.

In Yorkshire the top quality for being an effective manager was being a good communicator. In the education profession, staff rated it very highly - at 40.9%
- that a manager shows an interest in their home life. In the financial world - one of the most stressed professions - staff thought one of the most important factors in their managers - at 74.3% - was that they tried to reduce staff stress levels.

The survey showed that the most popular way of handling stress was to have a cup of tea, but the second most popular was to take a ’sickie’. The Welsh were more likely to take a sickie while Londoners would surf the internet and make personal calls. Those in the South-West are most likely to pop out for a cigarette break to combat stress!

Overall the survey found that 11% of us feel our bosses don’t care about us and one in five believe their boss lacks training at handling employees’ personal matters and over one in five say that their boss lacks the personality to do this.

Samaritans’ Project co-ordinator Jonathan Moran, stressed the importance of the WorkLife launch: This is a prime opportunity to raise the profile of the charity with employers. Samaritans is already an established provider of communication skills training in the workplace and WorkLife is a natural extension of the training we currently provide to external organisations.

Stress in the workplace is frequently cited as the number one issue affecting employee productivity.* Significantly, WorkLife has been designed to support the Health and Safety Executive’s Standards and Guidelines for tackling work- related stress. These standards were launched in November 2004 to help employers and employees work together to prevent excessive work related stress. The standards define the culture of an organisation where stress is being managed effectively.

I believe the survey’s findings show that not enough is being done at ground level to tackle stress in the workplace and highlight the need for the sort of training we are offering, said Jonathan Moran for Samaritans.

He added: Samaritans has been running communications skills training in the workplace for three years for organisations such as the Inland Revenue, National Air Traffic Services, Cancer Research UK and Citizen’s Advice. An academic study is being carried out over an 18 month period by our partners at Nottingham University which will measure the impact of WorkLife training. We are also developing a fully interactive version of the WorkLife programme on CD-ROM in conjunction with The Media Trust. This contains key elements of the training and will be available in the autumn.