Who must do one, and when it goes in writing
The duty comes from regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999: every employer must make a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to the health and safety of their employees. The word "health" carries the weight. HSE is explicit that work-related stress is a health risk like any other: it belongs in your risk assessment alongside the physical hazards, not in a separate wellbeing initiative.
There's no headcount threshold on the duty itself; it applies from your first employee. What changes at five employees is the paperwork: employ five or more people and the significant findings of your assessment must be recorded in writing. For almost every SME reading this, that means a written stress risk assessment isn't optional. The good news is that the written record is mostly a by-product of doing the assessment well, as the five steps below show.
The HSE Management Standards: six areas to assess
You don't have to invent a framework. HSE's Management Standards break work-related stress into six areas, and following the Standards approach is recognised as a suitable and sufficient way of meeting the legal duty. The six areas are:
- Demands: workload, pace and the working environment.
- Control: how much say people have over the way they do their work.
- Support: the encouragement and resources people get from managers and colleagues.
- Relationships: conflict, unacceptable behaviour, and whether it gets dealt with.
- Role: whether people understand what's expected of them, free of conflicting demands.
- Change: how organisational change is managed and communicated.
An assessment that covers those six areas, works out who is affected and how badly, and leads to action is doing what the regulator asks. Everything below is just those three things in order.
The Indicator Tool: the survey the regulator published
To measure the six areas, HSE published the Management Standards Indicator Tool, a 35-question survey covering all six, released under the Open Government Licence v3.0. It takes around 14 minutes to complete, and it's the closest thing this field has to an official yardstick. The full question set is in our template library: HSE Management Standards Indicator Tool.
Anonymity is not a nice-to-have here. Two of the six areas, Support and Relationships, are substantially about people's managers and colleagues, and nobody reports their manager as a source of stress on a form with their own name at the top. Anonymous collection is what makes the results honest enough to assess risk with.
HSE originally shipped the Indicator Tool alongside an Excel analysis spreadsheet, and people still hunt for that analysistool.xls download today. You don't need it. Running the same 35 questions online gets you anonymous collection, automatic scoring across the six areas, and results you can compare round on round, with no spreadsheet wrangling and no copy-paste errors.
The five steps in practice
A stress risk assessment follows the same five steps as any other risk assessment. When the hazard is stress, each step looks like this:
- Identify.Run the Indicator Tool, and put the results alongside the data you already hold: sickness absence, turnover, exit interviews. The survey shows you where the pressure sits; the operational data shows you what it's already costing.
- Evaluate. Look at which of the six areas score worst, and for whom. A Demands problem in one team and a Change problem in another need different responses; a whole-organisation average hides both.
- Act.Take the worst-scoring areas to focus groups, ask the people affected what would help, and turn the answers into an action plan with owners and dates. Start with the worst areas; you don't have to fix all six at once.
- Record. Dated survey rounds plus your action notes are the written record regulation 3 asks for. If you employ five or more people, this step is the one that satisfies the writing-it-down requirement.
- Review. Re-run the Indicator Tool and compare. Between full assessments, a short quarterly pulse (template: Workload Pulse) tells you whether your actions are landing, before the next full round confirms it.
One thing worth being straight about: the legal duty sits with you, the employer, and no survey tool makes you compliant by itself. What the Indicator Tool gives you is the evidence-gathering method the regulator itself published. Good software makes the honest version (anonymous, scored, repeated, recorded) cheap enough that it happens every year.