The Planning Inspectorate

Dealing with employee stress is a key concern in any organisation. As with most ailments, prevention is better than cure, which is precisely the approach being taken by the Planning Inspectorate. The Planning Inspectorate’s main activities are the processing of planning and enforcement appeals and holding inquiries into local development plans – activities sure to cause strong emotions in those involved.

The challenge

“At the Planning Inspectorate, we take stress very seriously. Our strategy has been to address any potential stress issues proactively” explained Robert Watson, head of human resources at the Planning Inspectorate. “We want to prevent it, where we can, but (where it does arise) we want team members to be as well equipped as possible to deal with it. So, we have created and implemented a full stress strategy which includes the development of a stress policy. As part of this policy, we worked with the soft skills division of QA, to develop and deliver a series of stress awareness workshops and we have also provided an on-call counsellor for staff, set up a gym and established a focus on healthy eating.”

The solution

Based on the Health and Safety Executive’s management standards and guidelines, plus interviews carried out with the Planning Inspectorate staff, QA created a series of half-day workshops. These were customised to the needs of different departments and roles, covering the four stages of stress management.

The first stage focused on recognising the symptoms of stress, in both oneself and others; the second then looked at understanding its potential causes; the third stage developed strategies for tackling and potentially eliminating these causes; the fourth supported the development of interim measures to relieve the symptoms, while the causes are being addressed. The workshops were piloted, then rolled out to the Planning Inspectorate’s administration managers, inspector managers and sub-group leaders.

“The feedback from the workshops has been excellent. All of those attending rated the quality of the training, the trainer and the content as excellent or of a very high standard,“ explained Karen Velasco, QA’s lead trainer at the Planning Inspectorate. “One particular issue at the Planning Inspectorate is that many inspectors spend most of their time working in the field, so they don’t have daily face-to-face contact with their inspector managers or sub-group leaders. Therefore, for these managers, making a judgement as to whether team members are being affected by stress is clearly quite difficult.

Their training programme was customised to include the Myers Briggs and other personality-based theories, so that managers could assess whether individuals are likely to be susceptible to stress and what specific indicators to look out for.”

Such was the success of the initial programme that it has now been further developed and rolled out to the administration teams themselves. Later this year, a version of the course will be developed and delivered to planning inspectors, so that everyone in the inspectorate will have had the chance to complete the stress-awareness programme by the end of 2006.