Step 4: Record your findings – develop and implement action plans
By now you will have consulted your employees, explored areas of concern and taken some initial steps to develop some proposed solutions. You should record your findings – to do this you could produce and share an action plan, which will:
- help you set goals to work towards
- help you to prioritise
- demonstrate that you are serious about addressing employees' concerns
- provide you with something to evaluate and review against
Overall action plan
If you have had sub-groups working on elements of the work or different departments/areas, you may need to collate their feedback to produce an overall action plan. The steering group should be responsible for collating the relevant sections into an overall action plan for the organisation or, where appropriate, part of the organisation.
The steering group may want to focus on the strategic, organisation-wide actions in developing an overall action plan. Consider having sections aimed at different levels of the organisation.
When developing your action plans, you should ensure that the actions suggested:
- are given an order of priority
- adequately tackle an issue (including a review process to check it does)
- have sufficient resources allocated to them
- are assigned to an individual or function
- have an agreed realistic timescale for completion
You need to agree the action plan with senior managers and employee representatives, and also share the final plan and timetable with employees. You may need to provide some background particularly where several problems have had to be prioritised.
Implement your action plan/s
To realise any benefits, the agreed and approved overall action plan and any lower level plans should be implemented as planned.
Procedures should be in place to record actions taken, plans developed and to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of specific actions.
Decide on a method and timescale for reviewing any action you take to tackle an identified causes of work-related stress.
Step 5:Monitor and review gives guidance on how to do this.