The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne has today delivered the ‘Autumn statement’

A copy of the full statement can be viewed here: (Click Link)

Signal was pleased to attend the first NoOffence! Criminal justice conference yesterday. This relatively new group has, in a short space of time, brought together an impressive cross section of professionals all interested in criminal justice reform.

We at Signal are currently working with NoOffence! on a working group to improve employment support for ex-offenders and potential employers.

Today we feature a post by Suzy Dale, on the subject of ‘Workplace stress.’

Suzy is a highly effective Business Psychologist, and Owner of a new business psychology consultancy, Dale & Associates.  For more than 15 years Suzy worked as an Occupational Psychologist for Civil Service departments.  During this time she supported leaders by devising and implementing coaching and mentoring schemes, and providing evidence-based advice relating to employee engagement, stress and absenteeism and cultural change management. 

You can follow Suzy on Twitter. 

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There’s been a plethora of commentary about workplace stress recently, mainly as a result of the CIPD and Simplyhealth survey which showed that stress is now the top cause of sickness absence in theUK.  This has been on the horizon for some time, and now with the compounding influence of rising living costs, wage freezes and fears over job security, it’s hit the number one spot. 

The ideal of course for organisations is that staff are happy, healthy and here (ie in the workplace!),

The financial cost to the nation as a result of stress-related sickness absence runs into billions of pounds a year according to HSE.  However, I believe that behind this figure lies three hidden truths.

I watched the recent story about Executive Pay levels with interest. It’s always a slightly inflammatory story, but the current economic context  of public sector cuts, pay freezes, redundancies and a more general story of economic doom, make stories of anyone doing well seem incendiary.

The rights and wrongs of the report and the use of Mean and Median analysis have been much discussed. This story felt to me like an opportunity for a media feeling aggrieved on the part of the general population to target someone to blame. When everyone is struggling, not sure whether to blame government, bankers, economists or whomever, it is a popular message to sell that it doesn’t seem right when individually we feel that we didn’t contribute to economic difficulties that we should have to pay. When Government is promoting a message of shared pain, that there should be any group of people doing economically well seems wrong.