Stress risk assessment: the HSE Management Standards and what employers must do

A stress risk assessment examines working conditions that could harm mental health and identifies necessary action. Employers in Great Britain must assess and manage work-related stress under the general health and safety framework. Northern Ireland has separate corresponding legislation. Wellbeing support can help individuals but does not replace action on harmful working conditions.

HSE’s Management Standards cover six areas of work design. They provide one recognised approach to assessment, alongside other suitable methods. This page explains the framework, individual needs and the separate equality-law duties that may apply.

Stress as a health and safety risk

HSE defines stress as an adverse reaction to excessive pressure or demands. Pressure and stress are not interchangeable: reactions and effects vary between people and circumstances. Identify and address work factors that can harm health rather than assuming only long-lasting pressure needs attention.

In its most recent annual statistics — for 2024/25 — the HSE reported that 964,000 workers in Great Britain experienced work-related stress, depression or anxiety, representing roughly half of all reported work-related ill health. The associated estimated 22.1 million working days lost made stress-related conditions the largest single cause of work-related ill-health time loss. These figures are accredited official statistics published by the HSE in November 2025.

The legal framing isn’t a presentational choice. It changes what the employer is required to do. Wellbeing initiatives are voluntary; risk assessment under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 is not. An organisation that runs a wellbeing programme but doesn’t carry out a stress risk assessment isn’t satisfying the legal duty.

The legal framework

The duty arises from the general framework. Section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires every employer to ensure the health, safety and welfare at work of their employees so far as is reasonably practicable. Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires a suitable and sufficient assessment of all foreseeable risks — including risks to mental health.

The HSE has been clear, in its statements and in enforcement guidance, that work-related stress sits squarely within this duty. The HSE’s Working Minds campaign — launched in 2021 and still its current active campaign — exists in part to communicate this position to UK employers who still treat stress as outside the H&S framework.

The Equality Act 2010 can impose a reasonable-adjustments duty where a worker is disabled. Pregnancy and maternity have separate protections, alongside specific health and safety requirements; pregnancy does not automatically create the disability reasonable-adjustments duty.

The six Management Standards

The HSE Management Standards were developed in the early 2000s as a structured framework for assessing organisational stress risk. They identify six areas of work design where evidence consistently shows poor management produces ill health. The standards are deliberately broad — they’re factors of work design, not symptoms of stress — and they’re meant to direct the assessment toward causes rather than effects.

Demands

The workload itself: the volume of work, the pace, the deadlines, the variety of tasks, the physical environment in which the work is done. The risk is that workers face demands they don’t have the resources to meet, sustained over time. Indicators of poor management include unrealistic deadlines, frequent overtime that becomes routine, and work that requires capabilities the worker doesn’t have.

Control

How much autonomy a worker has over how they do their job. The risk is that workers are required to follow procedures and timetables in detail without scope to adjust the work to their own pace, sequence or method. Evidence shows that work demands are much more tolerable when workers have meaningful control; the same demands without control are reliably stressful.

Support

The encouragement, sponsorship, training, equipment, supervision and colleague backing that workers need to do their jobs. The standard covers support from the organisation as a whole, from line management, and from peers. Inadequate support — by any of these — is a reliable producer of work-related ill health.

Relationships

Whether workplace relationships are constructive or destructive. The standard covers conflict, bullying, harassment, unacceptable behaviour, and the broader culture of how people treat each other at work. Where the organisation tolerates poor behaviour or fails to address grievances, sustained interpersonal pressure becomes a major stress risk.

Role

Whether workers understand what they’re expected to do, whether their roles conflict with each other, and whether they’re asked to do things they consider improper. Role ambiguity, role conflict and role overload are reliable contributors to stress-related ill-health and are areas where management action is straightforward when the problems are identified.

Change

How organisational change is managed and communicated. The risk isn’t change itself — workplaces change constantly — it’s change that’s poorly communicated, abrupt, contradictory, or imposed without consultation. Restructures, redundancy programmes, technology transitions and changes in management style are all common triggers.

The six standards help check that important aspects of work design have been considered. HSE also allows equivalent suitable approaches; an assessment is not automatically invalid because it uses a different structure.

Individual vs organisational stress risk assessment

The distinction is important and routinely blurred in competitor content. There are two separate but related assessments.

An organisational assessment examines working conditions and identifies action. HSE’s 35-question Indicator Tool can gather workers’ views, but it is one source of evidence rather than the whole assessment. Combine findings with consultation and other relevant information, then implement and review controls.

An individual stress risk assessment is the assessment carried out for a specific worker whose mental health is at risk — usually triggered by signs of distress, a return from sick leave related to stress, or a worker raising concerns directly. The individual assessment covers the specific pressures that worker is facing, what’s working and what isn’t, and what reasonable adjustments to working conditions could reduce their personal risk.

The two assessments answer different questions. Organisational assessment asks what in our work design is producing stress across the workforce? Individual assessment asks what in this person’s specific situation needs to change?

Consider both organisational risks and individual circumstances. An individual discussion or assessment may be needed where someone raises concerns, shows signs of stress or needs support returning to work. There is no universal requirement for two particular forms.

Organisations that rely entirely on individual assessments end up firefighting cases without ever addressing the conditions that produce them. Organisations that rely entirely on the organisational assessment fail individual workers who need specific changes now.

The Working Minds campaign and the 5 Rs

The HSE’s Working Minds campaign supports employers in carrying out stress risk assessment in practice. Its core framework is the 5 Rs:

Reach out

Start conversations with workers about workplace pressures. This is the precondition for assessment — without dialogue, the assessor doesn’t have the information needed to identify the actual stressors.

Recognise

Spot the signs of work-related stress in individuals and the indicators of poor work design at organisational level. Signs in individuals include changes in performance, withdrawal, irritability, increased absence, and changes in physical health. Indicators at organisational level include rising sickness rates, declining engagement scores, turnover patterns and recurring grievances.

Respond

Agree actions with the workers affected and with the wider team. Responses span the spectrum from individual adjustments (workload reduction, role clarification, additional support) to systemic changes (redesigning a process, recruiting additional capacity, restructuring management arrangements).

Reflect

Review what’s working and what isn’t. Stress interventions need to be evaluated; an action that looks good on paper but doesn’t change conditions for the workers affected needs revisiting.

Make it Routine

Build stress prevention into how the organisation operates day-to-day, rather than reacting after problems emerge. This is what distinguishes mature stress risk management from event-driven case work.

The 5 Rs are a practical complement to the Management Standards. The Standards identify the dimensions to assess; the 5 Rs describe the process for translating assessment into action.

The Equality Act overlap

This is where competitor guidance routinely falls short. Where work-related stress relates to a disability — and persistent mental ill health can itself be a disability under the Equality Act 2010 — the employer’s duty is no longer only about reasonable practicability under health and safety law. It’s also about reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act.

The two duties interact in practical ways. A worker returning from a period of sick leave for stress-related depression may have a disability for Equality Act purposes. The employer’s reasonable adjustments duty is then engaged: changes to working hours, workload, supervision arrangements, or physical workspace may be required, and failure to provide them can amount to disability discrimination, not just a breach of health and safety law.

Pregnancy is similarly covered: pregnancy and maternity are protected characteristics, and pregnancy-related stress is one of the areas where the pregnancy risk assessment duty intersects with the stress assessment duty.

Apply the relevant duties together. Disability may require reasonable adjustments, while pregnancy can require changes to working conditions or hours, suitable alternative work or paid suspension where the statutory conditions are met. Neither duty is accurately described as universally “more demanding” than the other.

Sector hot spots

HSE’s 2024/25 publication identifies public administration and defence, education, and human health and social work as industries with rates above the all-industry average in its three-year analysis. The examples below describe issues to consider rather than measured causes of every case:

Healthcare and social care

Sustained demand pressure, emotional load, shift patterns, exposure to distress, and chronic resource constraints. Stress risk assessment in healthcare needs to engage clinical leadership as well as HR.

Education

Workload during term time, evening and weekend marking, behavioural pressures, and rapidly changing policy environments. Teaching unions have been actively engaged on stress risk assessment for years.

Public administration and defence

Reorganisations, policy churn, and high public scrutiny combine with significant Change pressures.

Emergency services

Emergency-response work can involve distressing incidents, shift patterns and demanding decisions. Assess these risks for the specific service; the broad HSE industry categories do not provide one directly comparable emergency-services rate.

Stress risks can occur in any sector. Use the national data as context and assess the conditions affecting your own workforce.

Records and review

Worked example of a completed stress risk assessment record covering the six Management Standards

The assessment record should cover the six Management Standards, the workers and groups at risk, the controls and actions in place, the actions outstanding with owners and deadlines, and the review date. The Indicator Tool results, where used, should be retained for comparison with subsequent rounds.

Review if there is reason to doubt the assessment or significant changes affect the work, such as restructuring, altered workloads or concerns about existing controls. Choose any scheduled review according to the circumstances; annual review is not a universal statutory interval.

Agree follow-up arrangements for individual concerns and adjust them as circumstances change. Review support and controls promptly where they are not working, rather than relying on a fixed interval.

Where this connects in the cluster

Stress risk assessment connects most closely to working from home risk assessment (where isolation and blurred boundaries between work and home are common stress factors), pregnancy risk assessment (because of the Equality Act overlap and pregnancy-related stress specifically), and DSE risk assessment (because workstation-related musculoskeletal disorder and stress frequently co-occur in office workers).

For employers who want to build in-house competence to carry out stress risk assessment using the HSE Management Standards, formal Risk Assessment Training covers the methodological foundation. Stress-specific training is then a useful add-on, particularly for HR leads and line managers expected to carry out individual assessments.

Frequently asked questions

Is work-related stress a health and safety issue?

Yes. Employers in Great Britain have duties to assess and manage work-related stress under general health and safety law. Northern Ireland has separate corresponding rules. Support services do not replace assessment and action on work-related causes.

Do I need an individual stress risk assessment as well as an organisational one?

Consider individual circumstances where someone is at risk, alongside organisational working conditions. The work can be recorded in an appropriate format; the law does not prescribe two separate forms. Act on concerns and review whether the measures help.

What is the HSE Indicator Tool?

A 35-question survey about working conditions across HSE’s six Management Standards. It helps identify areas to investigate and should be combined with other evidence and worker consultation, not used as the sole assessment.

What if work-related stress relates to a disability or pregnancy?

Disability can trigger the Equality Act reasonable-adjustments duty. Pregnancy and maternity have separate discrimination protections and health and safety duties, which may require changes to work. Do not treat pregnancy alone as automatically engaging the disability reasonable-adjustments test.

What are the six Management Standards?

Demands, Control, Support, Relationships, Role and Change. They’re the six areas of work design where evidence shows poor management reliably produces work-related ill health. A suitable and sufficient stress risk assessment should consider all six.

Sources & references

Build in-house competence to carry out risk assessments using the HSE Management Standards.

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Mark McShane

Health & Safety Training Specialist, Online CPD Academy

Mark writes about workplace health & safety, risk assessment and accredited online training for Risk Assessment Training, part of Online CPD Academy.