HSE Management Standards, UK wide
Stress Risk Assessments
Work-related stress, depression or anxiety affected 964,000 workers in Great Britain in 2024/25. Mental health remains the largest single driver of work-related ill health. AL23 Safety carries out organisational stress risk assessments against the Health and Safety Executive Management Standards, turning survey data into controls you can actually implement, for clients UK wide.
What is a stress risk assessment?
An assessment of how the work is organised, not of who is coping
A stress risk assessment examines the design and organisation of work to find the features that make harm more likely. It looks at workload, autonomy, support, behaviour, role clarity and change. It does not diagnose anyone and it does not measure individual resilience.
That distinction is the whole service. Wellbeing initiatives, apps and awareness days help people cope with pressure. They do not alter the conditions creating the pressure, which means they do not discharge a risk assessment duty. HSE states the position plainly, that employers have a legal duty to protect workers from stress at work by carrying out a risk assessment and acting on it.
An individual stress risk assessment for one person, usually after a return from absence or a disclosure, is a different and narrower document. It supports a management conversation. It sits underneath the organisational assessment rather than replacing it.
Who needs one
Every employer, with recording mandatory at five employees
There is no exemption and no sector carve-out. The general assessment duty covers health in the broad sense. Mental health sits inside it. The practical question is not whether you need one, it is how much evidence your assessment needs to carry.
- Any employer with five or more employees, where the significant findings of the assessment must be recorded in writing
- Organisations with elevated sickness absence, turnover or grievance activity in a specific team or shift
- Employers who have had a stress related tribunal claim, a civil claim or a formal complaint about workload or management behaviour
- Sectors with high emotional demand, such as health and social care, education, emergency response, housing and customer facing roles
- Any organisation going through restructure, redundancy, system replacement or a change of ownership
- Employers with significant lone worker exposure, where isolation compounds every other psychosocial factor
The regulations that apply
Your legal framework, in plain terms
There is no stress regulation. The duty is assembled from the general law, which is why so many employers assume it does not exist. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires you to ensure health, safety and welfare so far as is reasonably practicable, with health understood to include mental health. The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 then require you to assess that risk and to record what you find. Alongside them sit the Equality Act 2010, the Working Time Regulations 1998 and the common law duty of care.
HSWA 1974 section 2(1)
The primary hook. Because health includes mental health, psychosocial risk falls inside the general duty.
HSWA 1974 section 2(2)(c) and 2(2)(e)
Information, instruction, training and supervision, plus a working environment that is without risks to health and adequate as regards welfare arrangements.
MHSWR 1999 regulation 3(1) and 3(6)
Suitable and sufficient assessment of risk, with the significant findings recorded where you employ five or more people, together with any group especially at risk.
MHSWR 1999 regulation 4 and Schedule 1
The general principles of prevention, including adapting the work to the individual and developing a prevention policy covering the organisation of work, working conditions and social relationships. These bite directly on job design.
Equality Act 2010 sections 15 and 20
Where a stress related mental impairment has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on day-to-day activities it is a disability. The reasonable adjustments duty then applies.
Two authorities shape the civil exposure rather than the regulatory one. Hatton v Sutherland [2002] EWCA Civ 76 sets out the practical propositions courts apply, including that an employer may generally take what an employee says at face value unless the indications of impending harm are plain enough to act on. Barber v Somerset County Council [2004] UKHL 13 confirmed the approach at the House of Lords.
What we assess
The six standards, working time and existing controls
The HSE Management Standards are guidance rather than law. They are not an Approved Code of Practice, which means you may use another method provided the assessment is suitable and sufficient. In practice they are the framework an inspector will recognise. They organise the work into six areas.
- Demands. Workload, work patterns and the work environment, including deadline density, shift design, overtime and the gap between resourcing and expectation
- Control. How much say each person has over the way they do their work, including pace, method, sequence and breaks
- Support. The encouragement, sponsorship and resources provided by the organisation, by line management and by colleagues
- Relationships. Promoting positive working to avoid conflict and dealing with unacceptable behaviour, which is where bullying and harassment intersect with the stress assessment
- Role. Whether people understand their role and whether the organisation ensures that they do not hold conflicting roles
- Change. How organisational change, large or small, is managed and communicated
- Working time patterns tested against the Working Time Regulations 1998, covering the 48 hour average, rest breaks, daily and weekly rest and night work
- Sickness absence, turnover, exit interview themes, grievance data and referral patterns, read together rather than one at a time
- Manager capability and the arrangements under regulation 5 and regulation 7, meaning whether anyone competent actually owns this
- Existing controls, with an honest judgement on whether each one works or merely exists
Our process
Prepare, measure, explore, then plan and re-measure
- 01
Prepare the organisation
We secure visible senior commitment, agree employee involvement and set up a steering group with union or employee representation. HSE puts this step before the assessment itself for good reason, since a survey issued without it produces poor response rates and distrust.
- 02
Measure
We run the free HSE Indicator Tool, a questionnaire mapped to the six Management Standards areas and answered on a five-point scale, then score it in the HSE Analysis Tool and benchmark the result against interim and long-term targets as percentile positions.
- 03
Explore
We hold focus groups by team, shift or site to find out what sits behind each score. The survey is a diagnostic. On its own it is not the risk assessment. HSE is explicit on that point.
- 04
Record and plan
We write the significant findings, identify the groups especially at risk and build an action plan with named owners, dates and a measure of success for each action.
- 05
Monitor and review
We re-measure at an agreed interval and test whether the actions moved the score, then feed the result into your health and safety management system.
What you get
Findings recorded and an action plan you can run
- A written organisational stress risk assessment recording the significant findings and the groups especially at risk, in the form regulation 3(6) requires
- Indicator Tool results by department, site and shift, benchmarked against the HSE targets and presented so that a small team is never identifiable
- A focus group findings report separating causes from symptoms, with anonymised verbatim themes
- A prioritised action plan splitting organisational changes from manager behaviours and from individual support, each with an owner and a date
- An individual stress risk assessment template and a manager conversation guide for use on return to work or after a disclosure
- A review schedule with the trigger events that require an early re-assessment
What we need from you
Your absence data and time to run the survey
- Sickness absence, turnover, grievance and exit interview data for the past two years, anonymised
- Organisation charts, shift patterns, staffing establishment against actual headcount, plus any current vacancy pressure
- Access to run the survey and to hold focus groups during working time, which materially affects response rates
- Any recent engagement or pulse survey results, which stops us duplicating what you already know
- A senior sponsor who can authorise the actions the assessment will identify
Why AL23 Safety
We assess the work but never diagnose the person
Accountable
When something is non-compliant, we say so clearly and set out the fix. If the data points at a specific manager, a specific rota or chronic understaffing, we write that down rather than recommending a resilience course.
Expert and chartered
Chartered Building Engineer and Health and Safety Professional leadership, working to current standards and legislation.
Practical, not just compliant
We stay within our lane. This is an organisational risk assessment carried out by safety professionals. We do not diagnose, treat or offer clinical opinion. We say clearly where a referral to occupational health or to a person's own general practitioner is the right route.
UK wide
We run stress risk assessments for single sites and for national organisations across the UK from our Manchester base.
Talk to us about work-related stress
A conversation before a survey
Most organisations already know roughly where the pressure sits. The value is in evidencing it and acting on it. A short call will tell you whether a full survey is the right starting point or whether targeted focus groups would get you further.
Common questions
Answers, up front
Cannot see your question? Get in touch and we will answer it directly.
Contact usYes, although no regulation names stress. The duty comes from section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 read with regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. HSE states the position directly on its own guidance. Its Working Minds campaign is built around the message that all employers must assess and manage stress through organisational risk assessment.
We have not identified a successful prosecution specifically for work-related stress. HSE's approach in this area is inspection, advice and improvement notices rather than prosecution. The practical barrier is proving that the organisation of work caused a particular health outcome. That is the honest picture. The commercial exposure is real but it lands mostly in civil personal injury claims and in employment tribunals rather than in the criminal courts.
Working Minds is an HSE campaign delivered under the Work Right brand. It is built on five steps, described as Reach out, Recognise, Respond, Reflect and make it Routine, with campaign moments during Stress Awareness Month in April and Stress Awareness Week in November. HSE also launched free online learning for employers on 12 May 2025. Becoming a champion carries no legal effect. It is a useful communications frame and nothing more.
A typical programme runs six to ten weeks from launch to action plan, driven by survey window, focus group scheduling and how quickly data reaches us. Cost is driven by headcount, the number of sites and shifts, the number of focus groups and whether you want us to facilitate the steering group. Tell us your headcount and site count and we will quote against that.
No. We report by group and suppress any group too small to protect anonymity, agreeing the minimum group size with you before the survey goes out. This is the single largest driver of response rate. Where a small team clearly has a problem we describe it at a level that lets you act without exposing individuals.
Directly. The Relationships standard covers unacceptable behaviour, which means a stress assessment frequently surfaces conduct issues. Where it does, the control sits in a separate and more specific piece of work, which is why we usually run this alongside a sexual harassment risk assessment for organisations preparing for the October 2026 duty.
Related services