Work-related stress can significantly impact both employee well-being and business performance. This occurs when job demands overwhelm an individual’s ability to cope, potentially leading to burnout, affecting mental and physical health, and hindering overall productivity. For small businesses and organisations, addressing workplace stress is about fostering a supportive, healthy, and motivated work environment where employees can thrive.
Employers play a foundational role by cultivating a work environment that minimises stress factors and supports stress management. However, they are no alone in addressing work-related stress. For example, OSH specialists assess risk factors, while managers, through their daily interactions with team members, are vital in recognising early signs of stress, promoting open communication, and offering support during stressful periods.
This page offers practical tools and strategies to help you identify and manage workplace stress, including ways to address psychosocial risks. Are you feeling stressed yourself? Don’t worry—there are resources here to help you recharge, reset, and build your resilience so you can face challenges with renewed strength.
The guide by the Finnish Centre for Occupational Safety helps employees and supervisors prevent harmful psychosocial stress together and provides support for situations where harmful stress is present.
This brochure from the Swedish Work Environment Authority provides step-by-step advise for workplace leaders on how to systematically address high workloads and stress in workplaces.
This toolkit from the Health and Safety Executive UK is designed to support managers and supervisors in engaging with their team members as part of a proactive approach to preventing and managing work-related stress. It is tailored specifically for smaller organisations so they can gather data on causes of stress.
This guide from the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work offers a practical five-step approach to managing psychosocial risks and musculoskeletal disorders. Designed for micro and small businesses, it provides clear explanations and exercises to create lasting workplace improvements that benefit both employees and employers.
This material by Workplace Strategies for Mental Health helps you to understand how chronic mental stress is defined and how to recognise hazards for it at your work. This tool provides workplace leaders, managers and supervisors strategies for reducing the risks in their workplaces to protect both employers and employees.
To minimise work-related strain, managers should assess and control factors that may lead to psychosocial risks, such as high demands, lack of control, or poor support systems. Workplace leaders can use this guide by the Finnish Occupational Safety and Health Administration to implement practical measures, including regular workload assessments, employee autonomy enhancement, and open communication, to improve workplace wellbeing.
This e-guide from the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work is tailored for employers and employees in small enterprises who want to start systematically addressing psychosocial risks in the workplace. It provides clear explanations of work-related stress and psychosocial risks, their impact on businesses and workers, and practical steps for prevention and management.
Feeling stressed? Follow these seven easy tips by Right Direction to help you de-stress and relax.
This one hour-long webinar by Anxiety and Depression Association of America presents tools and techniques to get (and stay) motivated, manage stress and burnout.
Fact sheet by the National Institute of Mental Health US to learn whether it’s stress or anxiety, and what one can do to cope.