Table of Contents
- What is Stress?
- What is Stress Leave?
- How Do Employers Grant Stress Leave?
- What Are Employers’ Obligations Surrounding Stress Leave?
- What Should Employers Do Once an Employee Returns?
- How Can Employers Prevent Work-Related Stress?
- What Lessons Can Employers Learn From COVID-19?
- Key Takeaways
- Frequently Asked Questions
As an employer, you are responsible for an employee’s health and safety in the workplace. This includes your employee’s physical and mental well-being. In Australia, stress leave is not an official category of leave, such as annual leave or sick leave. However, full-time employees are entitled to personal leave, which they can take to recover from physical or mental illness, including stress. As a result, it is essential that you understand your obligations when employees take stress leave and how you can assist with promoting an accepting workplace. This article will explain how you can manage stress leave in the workplace.
What is Stress?
Stress is when a person feels overwhelmed and unable to deal with certain life circumstances.
What Can Cause Stress?
The workplace can often become unpredictable as conditions change. For example, new projects may pop up, or staff changes can land an employee in the middle of somebody else’s task. Additionally, work volume can fluctuate, and deadlines can be challenging to meet.
The most common causes of work-related stress include:
- high or low workload;
- poor support;
- lack of clarity in the role;
- disorganisation;
- isolated working conditions; and
- negative workplace relationships, including bullying.
Hence, as an employer, you should be proactive in managing workplace stress. In conversations with your employees about their personal lives, always be sensitive about mental health conditions that may create severe stress. Listening to your employee and attempting to assist with work pressure can be a tremendous help in reducing work-related stress.
What is Stress Leave?
Under the Australian Government’s National Employment Standards, employees may take leave from work due to personal reasons. This may include illness or caring for another person who is ill. In this case, ‘illness’ includes issues related to mental wellbeing, such as stress and anxiety. Stress leave is personal leave an employee takes to relieve workplace pressure and recover from a stress-related illness. Importantly, stress leave is not a separate category of leave in Australia. Instead, it only refers to the cause of personal leave.
As an employer, understand your essential employment obligations with this free LegalVision factsheet.
How Do Employers Grant Stress Leave?
As an employer, you grant stress leave in the same way you would grant personal leave for other illnesses (for example, through HR in larger businesses). Under Australia’s National Employment Standards, permanent employees are entitled to 1 hour of personal leave for every 26 hours worked. This ratio of 1:26 usually equates to 10 days of personal leave per year for full-time employees and 1:26 pro-rata for part-time employees.
What Are Employers’ Obligations Surrounding Stress Leave?
Work, Health and Safety (WHS) laws state that you have a duty of care for employees’ safety, including their psychological safety. Accordingly, you should maintain WHS policies that prevent employees from creating situations that may cause stress-related illness or mental health issues to coworkers.
Critically, the law protects employees from any adverse actions you may take in relation to employees suffering from mental illness, including stress.
What Should Employers Do Once an Employee Returns?
When employees take personal leave due to stress, they should take care of their health and focus on being well enough to return to work. During this time, you should take the claim seriously and support the employee to get back to full health and return to work.
Accordingly, it may be necessary to assess the employee’s situation to identify any potential causes of stress and adjust their working conditions to limit stressful situations in the future. Safe Work Australia has some recommendations to reduce stress upon returning to work, including:
- writing tasks down for clarity;
- modifying the work environment; or
- managing the number of tasks the employee must complete.
How Can Employers Prevent Work-Related Stress?
Naturally, you as an employer would prefer if employees did not take personal leave due to stress. To support your employees’ well-being, you should prioritise creating an accepting workplace. This can extend to mental health assistance measures and an encouragement of open discussion. Stress-free employees are more engaged with their tasks, take fewer sick days, and generally have improved overall performance. There are also risk-management benefits to being proactive. In particular, early detection and stress management could prevent a future psychological injury compensation claim against your business.
Hence, you should regularly check in on employees to see how they manage their workload and environment. Many businesses are opening the discussion for mental health and providing relaxation and mindfulness support, such as meditation and yoga sessions. Ensure your employees are aware of mental health organisations that they can reach out to. Notable examples in Australia include Lifeline, Beyondblue, Black Dog Institute and Sane.
What Lessons Can Employers Learn From COVID-19?
The COVID-19 pandemic provides a valuable case study that you can learn from when considering mental health support for employees. The pandemic disrupted society in many ways, namely, pushing employees to self-quarantine and work from home. This created a sense of isolation on top of personal health issues and the risk that employees could have lost their jobs from businesses shutting down. All of these factors contributed to increased levels of stress during the pandemic, and at the time, it was likely for stress leave requests to increase. Mental well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic was such a significant issue that the Australian Government, until the end of 2022, offered Medicare-subsidised psychological therapy sessions for people affected by the pandemic.
Reflecting on the impacts of the pandemic, psychosocial hazards are just as important to regulate as physical ones. You should continuously draw your employee’s attention to external services that can help to maintain their mental health and well-being. your employees’ attention to these and other services to help maintain their mental health and well-being. Furthermore, if you have any support programs or psychological services of your own as an employer, you should consider investing in these to assist your employees.
During the pandemic, Safe Work Australia also had detailed information on how to perform risk assessments, adhere to physical distancing requirements, implement hygiene measures, and properly clean and disinfect the workplace to protect workers and others from exposure to COVID-19. Although the pandemic has ended, the agency still keeps up-to-date information about managing psychosocial hazards and stress. You should consult their website, which provides practical strategies and resources on ways to increase workplace safety.
Key Takeaways
Stress leave is when an employee takes personal leave due to work-related stress. Although stress leave is not an official category of leave, employees may use personal leave to take time off work when they are feeling stressed or overwhelmed. As an employer, you should take requests for stress leave seriously. Stress prevention is better than dealing with the effects of a stressed workforce, so you should implement strategies to help your employees cope with their roles.
If you need help managing stress leave in the workplace, our experienced employment lawyers can assist as part of our LegalVision membership. You will have unlimited access to lawyers to answer your questions and draft and review your documents for a low monthly fee. So call us today on 1300 544 755 or visit our membership page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Employers grant stress leave in the same manner as they would grant personal leave for other illnesses. Permanent employees are entitled to 1 hour of personal leave for every 26 hours worked. This ratio of 1:26 usually equates to 10 days of personal leave per year for full-time employees and 1:26 pro-rata for part-time employees.
Work related stress may occur when an employee feels they are unable to cope with an unmanageable workload. It can also occur due to an employee’s lack of control of their tasks or emotionally difficult situations, like workplace bullying.
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