Stress in the Workplace

What Causes Workplace Stress?

Workplace pressures causing psychological conditions include but are not limited to the following:

1. Excessively high workloads causing people to feel under pressure and overwhelmed.
2. Being overmanaged causing a feeling of being undervalued.
3. A lack of support from supervisors or management, causing a feeling of isolation.
4. Aggression within the workplace from bosses or co-workers in the form of physical or verbal threats, abuse or sexual harassment causing a feeling of fear and helplessness.
5. Passive aggressive actions such as withholding information or resources, not responding to emails or phone calls or being excluded and victimised.

What You Should Do if Suffering from Workplace Stress

If you are suffering from workplace stress then you should attend on your doctor as early as possible and report the circumstances causing the stress. You may not be intending to make a stress claim but recording the symptoms and the circumstances with your doctor as they occur will assist you later should your situation deteriorate to the point where you can no longer work and you decide to make a claim for compensation.

The workers compensation legislation excludes psychological claims where the injury is caused by discipline, dismissal, transfer, demotion, retrenchment, redeployment or an expectation of one of those actions.

Early Reporting

The early reporting of your symptoms and circumstances to your doctor will provide evidence to strengthen your claim and make it more difficult for the insurance company to prove that your psychological injury was caused by one of the above excluded matters.

Psychological injury claims are often pended and then rejected by the insurance company. Once your stress claim is pended there is no obligation on the insurer to contact you again. After 14 days from the date you receive the pended notice the claim is deemed to be disputed. It is then up to the you to take action to progress your claim.

If you have made a claim for workplace stress contact Perth City Legal on 9486 8088 to speak to one of our lawyers.