The Latest Bulletin

Stress can place immense demands on employees' physical and mental health and affect their behaviour, performance and relationships with colleagues. It's a major cause of long-term absence from work, and knowing how to manage the factors that can cause work-related stress is key to managing people effectively. Employers should take a systematic approach to identifying the risks of stress, for example by conducting stress risk assessments. This factsheet defines stress and draws the distinction between stress and pressure. It offers information on UK employers' duties under health and safety law and concludes with guidance on how to deal with stress at work, providing information on prevention, early intervention and stress policies. Click here to read more

The Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally shifted the way in which people work, with a rise in remote and hybrid working. While many workers, businesses and sectors have benefited from changing working practices during the pandemic, disabled people bore the brunt of the pandemic’s economic consequences and experienced higher rates of unemployment and redundancies than non-disabled people. Just 52.7% of disabled people are in employment, compared with 81% of non-disabled people. A key driver of the disability employment gap is workplace inflexibility. Pre-pandemic, many employers were reluctant to allow remote or hybrid working, even as a reasonable adjustment for disabled workers. However, as the pandemic led to compulsory remote working for most desk-based workers, we are now seeing employer plans change.…

We know that loneliness is dangerous to our physical and mental health. Older people who are lonely are at a higher risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke, as well as dementia. For all these reasons, efforts are being made to find ways to improve older people’s social lives, to help them to meet their fundamental human need to belong. However, recent work also shows that it’s not a simple case of the more social contact, the better. Periods of solitude bring benefits, too. One of these benefits is that they allow us to ‘recharge’. According to a popular model, our needs for social time and solitude move in opposite directions, like the two ends of a seesaw,…

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