A change is as good as.........

This week I thought I would continue with the Disability Discrimination theme having just got back from an all day conference on the DDA in London.

The speakers certainly backed up the view that until the law is amended the scope for ‘reason relating to’ discrimination is going to be very narrow. It is now important for employees and employers alike to concentrate on the question of reasonable adjustments because the Tribunals certainly will be.

As always the temptation to leave these all day seminars a little early is very high! If I had gone off to do some shopping I would have missed Dr Margaret Samuel’s very good presentation on stress management. Dr Samuel is the Chief Medical Officer at EDF Energy.

I certainly can’t cover all she said in this blog. Her talk focussed on prevention rather than cure. EDF had put in place an action plan to deal with stress including a self referral scheme for those persons who felt stressed. Prior to the plan being implemented in 2003 over half of their employees identified their stress as being work related. Four years later this had been halved with only 24% of the employees identifying work as being work related.

Of most concern to employers should be the fact that EDF identified change and change management as a major cause of work related issues. Having identified change as a problem EDF then set about doing something about it. Part of their strategy was what was described as a resilience enhancement program. This better equipped the workers and managers to deal with change and lead to a fall in change related stress.

In these times of change it would serve employers well to take a closer look at what can be done in relation to stress management. A good starting point is the HSE website (see link below).

http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/index.htm

Peter D