Psychological strain in the workplace, such as excessive or insufficient demands, is also examined more closely as part of the risk assessment. The range of potential sources of strain is constantly growing. The need for sustained concentration, multiple simultaneous demands and constant availability can be factors that lead to psychological hazards. Conflicts with colleagues, disagreements with managers, a lack of appreciation and limited opportunities for development may also place employees under considerable pressure. Poor lighting, noise or inadequate work equipment likewise do not create an ideal working environment. All these adverse conditions make everyday working life more difficult and can have a detrimental effect.
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Identifying psychological hazards in your organisation
- It matters a great deal how aware you are of the psychological strain your employees are exposed to. That is why appropriate workplace organisation is so important.
- Under the EU Framework Directive on occupational safety and health (89/391/EEC), employers must assess all risks to their employees' health, and that includes psychological strain. National law sets out the details: in Germany, for example, the Occupational Safety and Health Act (ArbSchG) has explicitly required it since 2013, regardless of company size. What is assessed are the working conditions, not the mental state of individual employees.
- The areas covered include deadline pressure, fear of losing one's job and awkward working postures. In principle, every possible source of tension should be removed or absorbed.
- Identified hazards must be eliminated to the required extent, with professional support from occupational physicians and safety specialists and with solutions developed specifically for the purpose.
- Structural shortcomings must also be addressed, and an open, friendly working atmosphere is a must. The top priority is a smooth workflow and a flexible way of organising tasks that leaves employees room to act.
- Work has to be made possible in the first place. Disruptive factors should be avoided and employees' needs taken into account. Participation and clear rules are part of normal working conditions.
To identify psychological hazards, you can use our questionnaire template, which helps you pinpoint psychological strain and disruptive factors in the workplace: Questionnaire for assessing psychological strain. You can copy the template to your own LamaPoll account and adapt it there.
Work tasks and work content
The following characteristics fall into this category of potential psychological hazards:
- Is the task complete, or are important facts, tools or other resources missing?
- Does the employee have enough scope to carry out the assigned task properly?
- How varied are the employee's tasks?
- Is enough information available for the employee to complete the task?
- How much responsibility does the employee carry? Is it too little or too much?
- Does the employee have the right qualifications and specialist knowledge, or is further training needed?
- How emotionally demanding is the work for the employee?
Working environment
Depending on the workplace and occupation, various physical, chemical and biological factors, and sometimes the way they interact, can play a role in the working environment. Physical factors include noise levels, ventilation, indoor climate and lighting. Inadequate work equipment can also be a source of strain.
Organisation of tasks
When work is disrupted, otherwise well-established workflows break down. How serious the disruption is can be gauged by how often the work has to be restarted.
How can workflows be disrupted?
The workload may be too high for the staff available, for example because colleagues are off sick. Problems may also arise between colleagues somewhere between accepting an assignment and completing it.
Several deadlines and appointments may also fall at the same time or even clash. If additional tasks are then added frequently, workflows and deadlines can suffer.
Highly complex tasks that have to be completed under stress are also prone to errors and disruption. The same applies to tasks that require a large amount of information.
Disruptions can be caused by colleagues, managers, customers, unreliable machinery, or missing materials or information. A disruption in this sense means that an interrupted task cannot simply be picked up again. Quick queries therefore only count to a limited extent. What matters is that results already achieved are lost and the work has to start again from scratch.
Social relationships within your organisation
Social relationships within an organisation include contact with both colleagues and managers.
Social relationships with colleagues
Employees interact with one another all the time at work, and social relationships form through this contact with colleagues. Social support, including good teamwork and solving problems together, is an important element here. It gives employees the chance to ask one another for advice and share best-practice approaches.
Possible critical factors
- Single offices or staff shortages can lead to a lack of social support among colleagues
- Collective punishment, the isolation and exclusion of individual employees, or poorly organised tasks lead to social stressors such as conflict and disputes. Intercultural problems and language barriers can intensify these stressors
- Performance-related pay or competition for project budgets and staff can increase rivalry within the workforce, which can lead to uncertainty and even a loss of trust
Social relationships with managers
Through their role within the organisation as a whole, their interaction with managers and their day-to-day work exchanges, employees build a social relationship with one or more managers. This relationship can be disrupted by work-related problems and difficulties or by the need for support.
Possible critical factors
- The manager lacks the capacity and resources to give employees the social support they need, for example due to staff shortages, excessive administrative work or a lack of qualifications
- Poor communication, information passed on too late or deliberately excluding employees from decisions creates social stressors that damage the relationship with the manager and lead to conflict
- Insufficient recognition of the employee's work and abilities, for example a negative view of their performance, authoritarian allocation of tasks, or critical and negative feedback
Organisation of working time
How working time is organised has always been important for protecting employees. The longer people work, the longer they are exposed to strain, which also affects how intense that strain is. At the same time, working time cannot be considered separately from economic factors: companies need to be able to respond flexibly to the market to stay competitive.
In the EU, the Working Time Directive (2003/88/EC) sets minimum standards. National law may be stricter. The rules below give the EU framework and use Germany as an example.
Working time
Working time is any period during which employees are working, at the employer's disposal and carrying out their duties. In Germany, for example, it runs from the start to the end of work, excluding rest breaks.
Night work
Under the Working Time Directive, night time is a period of at least seven hours, defined by national law, that always includes midnight to 5 a.m. In Germany, for example, night time runs from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m., and work counts as night work if it covers more than two hours of that period.
Daily working hours
The Working Time Directive does not set a daily limit, but average weekly working time, including overtime, must not exceed 48 hours. Many countries also set daily limits. In Germany, for example, working hours may not exceed 8 hours per working day (Monday to Saturday); they can be extended to 10 hours if an average of 8 hours is not exceeded over 6 months or 24 weeks. Limits like these prevent excessive demands and protect employees' health in the long term.
Rest breaks
Breaks, meaning interruptions to working time, allow employees to recover. They prevent excessive fatigue and reduce the risk of accidents and errors.
Rest periods
Rest periods give your employees time to recover, rest and recharge. After work, they need enough time to relax, eat, sleep and pursue their hobbies.
Night and shift work
Employees who work nights or shifts are under greater strain than those with regular daytime hours, because they work at shifting, changing and unsociable times. This disrupts the body's natural rhythm and makes it harder to take part in social and family life.
Work on Sundays and public holidays
Sundays and public holidays are meant for rest and leisure. Many countries protect them by law; in Germany, for example, there is a statutory day of rest on Sundays and public holidays. This allows employees to take part in social, cultural and religious life.
On-call duty
Under EU case law, on-call time spent at the workplace counts in full as working time, even when no active work is done. For standby duty at home, generally only the time actually spent working counts. The main strain comes from having to be ready at all times: rest and sleep are interrupted, and free time can only be planned to a limited extent.
Questionnaire template: Psychological strain in the workplace
One way to identify psychological strain in the workplace is an online survey. An employee survey provides the data you need to assess psychological hazards such as disruptive factors or excessive or insufficient demands. Feel free to use our free template as a starting point. The questionnaire gives examples of topics to cover in a psychological risk assessment and should be adapted to your organisation and areas of work and expanded where necessary. You can copy the template to your own LamaPoll account with one click and adapt or extend it there to reflect the relevant activities, strains and hazards.
We have been using the LamaPoll platform since 2015 for our surveys on psychosocial risk assessment. Our MAVA questionnaire (Munich Audit for Work Situation Analysis) always runs without errors and with complete reliability. In addition to the high data protection requirements that LamaPoll fulfils, it is always good to know that customer service helps quickly and effectively when questions arise. This has enabled us to successfully support numerous clients in protecting the mental health of their employees.
