Dekra occupational safety report 2018/2019
Employers do too little to combat stress
The majority of medium-sized companies ignore legal regulations on stress and burnout prevention. Only four out of ten companies carry out the legally required psychological risk assessment to prevent stress-related illnesses.
This is one of the initial findings from the DEKRA Occupational Safety Report 2018/2019, which will be published at the end of 2018.
For the study, the forsa institute was commissioned by Dekra to survey a total of 300 randomly selected decision-makers in HR or occupational health and safety in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs with 10 to under 500 employees). A key topic of the representative study is risk assessment, which is the central element of German occupational health and safety law.
Since 2013, the Occupational Health and Safety Act has stipulated that employers must also systematically assess the psychological hazards of employees in the workplace. If necessary, the employer must initiate measures to combat stress at the workplace that causes illness. Private and professional mental stress is a major contributor to burnout or musculoskeletal disorders and thus to absenteeism and quality deficiencies.
"The survey results show that even after five years, many SMEs still don't know how to deal with the issue," says Dr. Karin Müller, Head of People & Health at Dekra. "Yet solutions exist to carry out psychological risk assessments effectively and in compliance with the law. What is needed are procedures that show how the workforce is really feeling and which stress actually makes people ill."
Absences due to mental stress are increasing nationwide: according to the AOK Absenteeism Report 2018, the frequency of absences due to mental illness increased by 67.5% between 2007 and 2017. These illnesses also lead to particularly long periods of absence. With an average of 26 sick days per certificate, they lasted more than twice as long as an average sick note in 2017.
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