Stress related time off work costs organisations billions of pounds. To this can be added the effects of individual reduction of productivity, impaired judgment, poor decisions, lost opportunity, and the impact that can all have on the organisations culture and customers, etc.

We work with teams to help them understand the causes of stress and how team building initiatives can help them cope with it.

Stress is increasingly recognised as a health and safety at work issue. Employers can now face claims in the civil courts for damages for the breakdown of an employee's mental health. There could also be additional employment related effects with victims seeking compensation in the industrial tribunal courts for unfair dismissal, for a detriment because of a stress-related deterioration in their health or for having complained about stress at work. The organisation's main obligations are: to ensure, under the Health and Safety at Work Act etc, as far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety at work of its employees, by ensuring that employees have a safe place of work, safe equipment and appliances with which to work and also a safe system of work to comply with health and safety legislation appropriate to its workplace to carry out risk assessments (and this could increasingly be taken to include stress audits) and put in place appropriate protective and preventive measures as part of the risk assessment, it must ensure that its employees receive proper instruction, training and supervision and are kept fully informed of health and safety issues which may affect them and the steps which they should take to guard against health risks not to dismiss unfairly employees with two or more years service, whether on health grounds or otherwise not to dismiss or subject to a detriment, employees, regardless of length of service, on specified health and safety grounds.

In addition to the legal case, the business arguments for taking care of an employee's mental health, of which unhealthy stress is only one manifestation, include ethical considerations such as respecting and valuing the individual, allowing for his or her unique personality differences and allowing for balance between corporate and private life so as to ensure continued health, commitment and motivation.

This one day stress management course is aimed at raising awareness of stress, its causes, affects and techniques managing it. Participants will identify their own stressors and stressors in the organisation prior to forming a personal action plan to first cope with and then reduce their stress levels.

Participants will review the many potential daily stressors, coming not only from physical events but also social situations, our work, general living, our feelings, our thoughts and perceptions. Mostly these stressors are perceived to be in balance. The response we generate can be both positive and negative and is characterised by the scale of the perceived importance. In order to survive, be energised and be creative. It is when the balance is wrong, however, that difficulties arise.

Everyone's response to stress will be different because each individual is unique. So, a person who is a high achiever may find it easier to cope with the pressures of an executive role than someone whose expectations are in another direction, and vice versa. Some people thrive in situations that others find totally overwhelming. It is the degree of adoption that people have to make to a situation which determines whether they react positively or negatively and find they either go forward or fail to cope.