The need: Line managers play a pivotal role in enabling their people to work well, yet too often are sited as a leading cause of stress at work. We have worked with the Health and Safety Executive, Chartered Institute of Personnel Development and academic and organisational partners to develop an understanding of the key manager behaviours that protect and promote health at work, inform national and organisational policy on health at work, and translate this work to into practical and actionable resources for managers and professionals supporting them.

Our approach: To ensure that the behaviour framework and resources were appropriate for national guidance (and relevant across sectors and roles), we engaged in a robust programme of research including:

• Establishing a steering group comprised of policy makers, trade union representatives and employers and employees to provide oversight and guide the project
• 400 interviews with employees and managers working across sectors and job roles to identify the key behaviours relevant to reducing and preventing stress at work
  
• Longitudinal surveys research with over 800 employees and managers to examine the associations between manager behaviour and individual and organisational health outcomes
• Intervention study with 207 managers and their teams to examine the effectiveness of training
• Interventions within ten organisations to identify the obstacles and facilitators to implementation
• We have published widely on this research in professional and academic journals, and research reports demonstrating efficacy of the framework, development strategy and guidance.
• Worked with the CIPD and a multi-professional stakeholder group to translate the findings into practical actionable guidance and support materials to provide managers, and professionals supporting them, to raise awareness of the impact of their behaviour, identify development needs and develop resources to support them in improving their competencies to manager others in a way that protects and promotes health and wellbeing at work. The resources include fact sheets, guidance and interactive resources including a quiz with feedback.
• To review the manager behaviours, guidance and interactive resources see Line manager resources developed for the CIPD

The outcome:

• The CIPD has embedded the behaviours across their guidance and training materials
• The management competencies framework and associated resources are also recommended by other leading bodies such as Acas, HSE and IOSH
• Organisations in the UK and internationally, across sectors (including local governments, police services, NHS trusts, higher education institutions, Health and Safety Executive Northern Ireland, The Royal College of Nursing, the University College Union and the Trades Congress Union) have integrated the approach into their stress and health and safety policies.
• This competencies-based approach to supporting managers has been referenced as best practice in seminal national policy reports, for example Stevenson/Farmer in their Thrive at Work review (2017) noted that this approach "provides a strong road map for the steps to achieving the changes that the review proposes."
• The approach has been integrated into organisational-wide programmes facilitating Board level and senior leader training to cascade behaviour change throughout the organisation (eg. Asahi, Babergh and Mid Suffolk Council), and used by consultants internationally, including Italy, Japan and Australia.