Posted By Jeffrey Watt JB I'm not up on the parlance. What do you mean by self selecting responses. Sorry my stoopid chip is in overdrive today. Jeff

Posted By Kieran J Duignan For starters, Jonathan, it's a good idea to avoid language such as 'paranoia' - unless you really want to trigger unresolvable levels of conflict-riddent stress. Perhaps the core concepts are really 'defensiveness','anxiety'and - especially'-'a creative touch'? A 'competent' outsider - e.g. a chartered occupational psychologist who is also a chartered safety and health practitioner and a qualified counsellor - may have the advantage that he/she can be wheeled in as a 'neutral' competent person, listen and report and leave. He/she can avoid unfounded allegations of bias and contamination, to a degree that is rarely possible when an employee, however pure his motives, takes the lead. He/she can also be versatile, e.g. offer to conduct a focus group or use the comparatively powerful repertory grids, as an alternative to written survey. An independent competent person can also act in a shrewdly and creatively confronting style: I have, for example, on occasions informed staff that they forfeit their statutory rights to complain about an employer where they prevent me, as the appointed independent 'safety-competent person', from conducting a valid assessment. This normally results in high-quality co-operation; in the rare event where it didn't, I have fulfilled my 'threat' and gained reasonable compliance by principled confrontation (which most staff applauded very enthusiastically because they strongly resented the waves habitually created by self-centred bullies). Emotional and political tensions about stress are often similar to those that used to arise about redundancy management when that was still 'hot'. Yet for about a decade, I worked intensively in several organisations as a 'redundancy, career and stress counsellor', sometimes at the active request of 'aggressive' trade unions who were persuaded I had no hidden agenda (and became clients themselves when their turns to exit came along).

Posted By Jonathan Breeze Kieran, Fair point about my phrasiology there, I was intentionally being blunt to simplify the point and stimulate a discussion. I do like the alternative descriptions you have given, however I don't want to couch the terms too much either. All, Discussing the situation with a Data Analyst of my acquaintance, a nul response from specific departments might actually be a result we can investigate by itself, even if it does not fit in neatly with the HSE Indicator Tool. However it still doesn't solve the problem that I need to ask staff certain questions about e.g. gender, which department they are they in, and whether they are F/T or P/T in order to meaningfully analyse the results. If I do this I can't help but identify some people in the organisation (e.g. in our female biased organisation I am one of only two male head office staff). I'm also in the situation where baseline data is needed by the board before funds could be released to approach a 3rd party - but that's another issue.

Posted By Jonathan Breeze That's actually quite helpful Tabs. We thought we had already done that to an extent during the last X months of discussion. But the gender question will always pose a problem in any organisation or department where there is a clear majority of one gender. So we would therefore need to remove that particular question in our organisation. However how would we then be able to find out whether workplace stress was more prevalent in a particular gender of employee?

Posted By J Knight How we get around the departmental identifier is we ask the respondents to put the answers into labelled envelopes; the question sheets themselves cannot identify a respondents location. The location batches are processed one location at time. I am the only person who ever opens the envelopes; I keep all the completed quesrionnaires in a locked drawer; I am not in line of management to anybody in the Charity except for my Retail H&S Adviser & he's not stressed ;-). We have only had problems with fears about anonymity in one workplace, and it only affected two returns, John

Posted By Jonathan Breeze Jeff, That was my original proposal in our organisation and for much the same reasons. However the counter argument I put forward (because I believe that management should see the full picture) was that the HSE had published this survey & analysis tool and that we could hardly be censored for using the system that they had created. In the end they went with the HSE Tool administered internally.

Posted By garyh I suggest that you either get the results sent directly by the respondents to an independent body or to a trusted on site "friendly face" and give an absolute guarantee of anonymity. Managers just get to see the anonymised results. Having done this survey in large and small organisations, at very different levels of safety excellence, the results were similar. I suspect that it gets skewed by "whingeing" however it is a great starting point for worker involvement and consultation.........not the end point. Doing something with the results is the hard bit.

Posted By Jonathan Breeze Max, We don't know because they haven't been sampled. However, when you hear conversations along the lines of "I'm not going to respond because they'll be able to work out it's me from my answers." Then it does raise alarm bells that those with either negative experiences (or possibly a negative outlook) are not being sampled. What it 'could' mean is that you cannot assume that the responses you have received are in fact random, but that the methodology of using questionnaires to measure stress in the workplace is flawed in the first place.

Posted By J Knight Jonathon, I think you probably have it right; there are flaws in the method, and it is a problem if there is an atmosphere of recrmination (real or imagined). Significantly, the one workplace where we definitely had people afiling to respond because of fear is one where we know that the staff culture is one of conflict. In this case, the Manager knows what is happening, she just needs the stress survey as a way of taking heer concerns back to the workforce for discussion; a way of opening things out, if you like, John

Posted By Jonathan Breeze Tabs, Your raising of that very question in your initial response was helpful, in that it alerted me to the fact that the question may not be necessary. Some members of the reviewing panel had previous experience of preparing equal opps questionnaires, which may have clouded the issue. Also there was an assumption that this data would be useful in identifying if pregnant employees were at particular risk. Thus the potential consequences of exposure to stress were perhaps being confused with whether individuals were suffering from stress in the first place. Does that clarify what I meant? I'm frustrated now that the whole thing was approved by so many people without anyone picking up on it at the time.

Posted By Diane Thomason Kieran Do you mean language such as "self-centred bullies"?? (as in your post above)

Posted By H Klinkenberg Jonathan As a freelance professional corporate stress manager I have worked on many stress risk assessments and stress audits with many organisations of all sizes. I was involved in stress auditing long before the HSE introduced their management toolkit. The best I have achieved where completing a voluntary completion questionnaire on its first run was 80%, the usual percentage is between 40% and 50%. As the questionnaire should be repeated in about 18 to 24 months, getting a better percentage on the second run will indicate an increased trust in management. Thus you have shown a measurable improvement with regards to ‘trust in management’, which used to be a significant stress indicator in the old Stress Audits. You are trying to find stress issues, not prove they don’t exist. Management would like to believe that they don’t exist but we all know the truth. Getting to opinion of over 40% of the workforce is a significant result that gives you a great starting point for introducing stress risk minimisation. Regards Humphrey Klinkenberg Freelance Stress Management Consultant and Trainer