Your Responses Confirmed – Action on Demands, Support & Change
On behalf of the SSTA Health, Safety and Wellbeing (HSW) Committee, I want to sincerely thank the 600 members of staff who took the time to complete our recent confidential survey on work-related stress.
As promised, we approached this survey with a commitment to calling “workload” what it is: Work-Related Stress. Your high, honest response rate, and clear feedback, framed around the Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) six key factors, have given us a robust, data-driven mandate for change.
The results are exceptionally stable and confirm the severity of the work-related stress crisis. We are moving forward with a decisive action plan based on the three most pressing issues you identified, viewing them as organisational health risks.
1. Validated Top 3 Sources of Stress
The survey used the HSE Management Standards to measure stress factors on a scale of 1 (Most Stressful) to 6 (Least Stressful).
| Rank | HSE Factor | Mean Rank (N=600) | The Core Problem |
| 1 | Demands | 1.55 | Excessive workload, unreasonable deadlines, and unsustainable volume of non-contact tasks. |
| 2 | Support | 3.50 | A lack of practical resources, inadequate assistance, and insufficient managerial encouragement to cope. |
| 3 | Change | 3.63 | Organisational change is poorly managed, rushed, or implemented without necessary consultation and resource allocation. |
Key Takeaway: The data is unambiguous. 93.7% of you place Demands in the top three stressors. High demands, coupled with a lack of Support and disruptive Change, create an unacceptable environment of stress.
2. Our Immediate, Data-Driven Action Plan
The HSW Committee, in collaboration with working with COSLA and Scottish Government, will focus all efforts on these three priorities. Our goal is to achieve systemic, measurable relief, not just temporary fixes.
A. Priority 1: Eliminating Demands (The ‘Don’t do’ List)
We will be campaigning on the Administrative Task Audit immediately. This is not a review to ‘streamline,’ but to eliminate non-essential bureaucracy.
- Task Audit: Members will log all non-statutory administrative and data-driven tasks over a four-week period to identify those that can be removed or delegated.
- Communication Charter: We will work to establish a formal protocol that creates clear boundaries for electronic communication, confirming that no response is expected outside of contractual working hours.
B. Priority 2: Enhancing Support (Practical Assistance)
- Protected Time: We will continue to campaign for the increase in minimum non-contact time, (90 minutes) is ring-fenced, protected time within the working week dedicated purely to planning, preparation, and collaborative support, ensuring this time cannot be usurped by meetings or administrative cover.
- Targeted Training: We will campaign that management receives focused training on the HSE standards, emphasizing how to provide practical support and conduct meaningful, supportive welfare check-ins, rather than just performance monitoring.
C. Priority 3: Managing Change Effectively
- New Change Protocol: We will propose a formal requirement that all new initiatives include a clear Consultation Period, a guaranteed Phase-in Strategy, and the removal of a corresponding old task to prevent additive workload.
3. Next Steps
We believe that formally identifying these factors as work-related stress, rather than simply ‘workload,’ is the crucial first step toward lasting, systemic change.
The full, detailed report will be shared with representatives of COSLA and Scottish Government. We commit to providing a progress update on the implementation of the three priority actions at Congress.
A further survey will ask you to determine what aspects of demand need addressed. This survey will ask for your local authority, so these issues can be acted on directly through your district secretaries.
Thank you again for your honesty and participation. We are committed to using this data to create a safer, less stressful, and more sustainable working environment for everyone.
Grant McAllister
Convenor,
SSTA Health, Safety and Wellbeing Committee