The HSE Management Standards in plain English: the six causes of work stress
The HSE identifies six areas of work design that cause stress when they are handled badly. This guide explains each one in plain English, says what the law actually requires, and sets out what a line manager can change without waiting for anybody’s permission.
964,000 workers in Great Britain were suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25. Set against 1.9 million people with work-related ill health of any kind, that is roughly half of it, and the single largest category. HSE, key figures for Great Britain 2024/25
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The rest of the guide covers what the Management Standards are, what the law does and does not require, then all six causes: what each one looks like when it goes wrong on a real team and the change worth making. One-off, you won’t need to do this again on this device.
The Management Standards, without the jargon
The HSE stress management standards set out six areas of work design consistently linked to poor health and lower productivity when they are handled badly. Each is written as a state to be achieved, so the test is never whether the area exists in your organisation. It is whether it is being managed well.
| Standard | What the HSE says it covers |
|---|---|
| Demands | Workload, work patterns and the work environment. |
| Control | How much say the person has in the way they do their work. |
| Support | The encouragement, sponsorship and resources provided by the organisation, line management and colleagues. |
| Relationships | Promoting positive working to avoid conflict, and dealing with unacceptable behaviour. |
| Role | Whether people understand their role, and whether the organisation ensures they do not have conflicting roles. |
| Change | How organisational change, large or small, is managed and communicated. |
Six areas, not six personality types
What is notable about that list is what is absent from it. Nothing about individual resilience, nothing about personality, nothing about coping strategies. Every one of the six describes a feature of how the work is organised. That is deliberate, and it is the most useful thing about the framework, because it moves the question from “who is not coping?” to “what about this job is making it hard to cope?” A manager can change a work pattern. A manager cannot change somebody’s resilience by asking for it.
Guidance, but the duty behind it is real
Following the Management Standards is not itself a legal requirement. Assessing and managing the risk of work-related stress is, under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 (sections 2 and 3) and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. Employers with five or more employees must record their findings. The HSE presents the Standards as an approach it considers suitable and sufficient for meeting that duty, and an employer may use a different method if it is equally rigorous. What is not available is doing nothing.
An employee assistance programme is a support route for people who are already struggling. A risk assessment is an examination of what is producing the strain in the first place. They answer different questions, and only one of them is what the duty asks for.
What each one looks like, and what to change
For each area: what it actually looks like when it goes wrong on a real team, and two changes a manager can make this week without waiting for a policy or a budget.
Demands
Workload, work patterns and the work environment. On a team this shows up less as “too much work” and more as work that arrives unpredictably, competes with itself and has no visible finish line. Someone with a full but plannable week is usually fine. Someone whose week is reordered three times by Wednesday usually is not, even at lower total hours.
- When you add something, say out loud what it displaces. If nothing displaces it, you have added to the load rather than reprioritised.
- Ask what the finish line looks like. If nobody can describe it, that is the problem, not the volume.
Control
How much say a person has in the way they do their work. This is the most cost-free lever on the list, because it is usually about method rather than outcome. People told both what to deliver and exactly how to deliver it carry all of the accountability and none of the agency, which is a reliable recipe for stress even at modest workloads.
- Be specific about the outcome and deliberately loose about the method, unless the method genuinely matters.
- Let people choose the order of their own week wherever the sequence is not load-bearing.
Support
The encouragement, sponsorship and resources provided by the organisation, line management and colleagues. The gap here is rarely goodwill. It is availability and specificity. “My door is always open” is not support, because it puts the entire burden of initiating on the person least able to carry it. Support is a scheduled conversation that happens whether or not anything is wrong.
- Protect the regular one-to-one. A cancelled one-to-one is a message, whether or not you meant to send it.
- Name who to escalate to and when. Ambiguity about that is itself a source of stress.
Relationships
Promoting positive working to avoid conflict, and dealing with unacceptable behaviour. The word “dealing” is doing the work in that sentence. Teams do not usually suffer from the existence of a difficult relationship. They suffer from watching one go unaddressed, because that teaches everyone what the real standard is regardless of what the policy says.
- Address the small thing early. Almost every serious case started as something someone decided not to mention.
- Be visibly consistent. Tolerating from a high performer what you would challenge in anyone else is the fastest way to lose a team.
Role
Whether people understand their role, and whether the organisation makes sure they are not given conflicting ones. Role stress is quiet and easy to miss because it looks like underperformance. Someone reporting to two people with different priorities, or holding a job that has drifted two years from its description, is not failing to cope. They are being asked to satisfy requirements that cannot both be met.
- Ask people to describe their own job back to you. Where their version and yours differ is where the stress is.
- If someone serves two masters, agree the priority order between the two of you rather than leaving them to arbitrate it.
Change
How organisational change, large or small, is managed and communicated. Uncertainty is the active ingredient. People can absorb a great deal of change and very little ambiguity, and in the absence of information they supply their own, which is almost always worse than the truth. The cost of saying “we do not know yet, here is when we will” is far lower than the cost of the silence it replaces.
- Say what is not changing as well as what is. It is usually the larger and more reassuring list.
- Give a date for the next update even when there is nothing to update. It converts open-ended worry into a wait.
Six areas is a diagnostic, not a to-do list. Read back through them and pick the two your team would score worst on today. Those two are where the stress is coming from, and fixing them properly will do more than touching all six lightly. The other four will still be there next quarter.
Five steps, and the one everybody skips
The HSE frames this as a step-by-step risk assessment. In practice it runs roughly as follows.
- Get senior commitment first. The findings will point at workload, resourcing and management practice. If nobody senior has agreed in advance to act on that, the exercise generates data and resentment in equal measure.
- Gather evidence across all six areas. The HSE publishes an Indicator Tool for this. Read it alongside what you already hold: absence data, turnover, exit interviews and grievances.
- Analyse by team, not just organisation-wide. A headline average almost always conceals the two or three teams carrying the problem. Aggregate results are the most common way a real issue gets missed.
- Take the results back to the people who gave them. This is the step everybody skips. Focus groups turn a score into a cause. “Support scored low” is not actionable. “One-to-ones get cancelled whenever we are busy” is.
- Write the action plan, then measure again. Without a re-measure it is a survey, not a risk assessment. Employers with five or more employees also need to record their findings.
An organisation runs the assessment, finds demands and control score badly, and responds with a mindfulness app and a resilience workshop. Both may be worth having. Neither addresses what the assessment found, and staff notice immediately when the response does not match the finding.
Give your managers the tools, not just the framework
Five of the six standards describe things a line manager controls week to week. Stress Management for Managers takes them off the page and into practice: spotting the signs early, holding the conversation and changing the conditions that produce the pressure. Onsite or online, tailored before delivery.
Enquire about Stress Management for ManagersThis guide is general information for employers and people leaders. It explains the HSE Management Standards and the underlying legal duty. It is not legal advice, it is not a compliance assessment and it does not certify an organisation against any standard. The framework itself is published by the Health and Safety Executive. Related reading: our post on why pressure is not the same as stress. Every session is tailored to your organisation before delivery.