The HSE Management Standards are six areas of work design, demands, control, support, relationships, role and change, which HSE describes as "a set of conditions" that reflect good practice in managing work-related stress; they are guidance rather than law, and HSE does not expect employers to meet all of them.
That last clause is not a technicality. It is HSE's own position, and it changes what the Standards are for.
HSE describes the Standards as demonstrating "good practice through a step-by-step risk assessment approach" and providing "a yardstick by which organisations can gauge their performance". They are the regulator's own published method for discharging a statutory duty that sits elsewhere.
The duty is regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999: a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to employees' health, with the significant findings recorded in writing at five or more employees, and the risk controlled under section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. HSE puts the separation cleanly in its own guidance: the Management Standards "are not new laws", while employers "already have duties".
Following them is one route, and HSE writes it conditionally: "If you follow the Management Standards approach correctly, you will be adopting an approach that is considered suitable and sufficient." For organisations using a different method, HSE publishes an equivalence checklist headed "Is my risk assessment approach suitable and sufficient?"
They are also not an Approved Code of Practice. There is no ACOP for the 1999 Regulations, and none anywhere on stress, so nothing in this territory carries the special evidential status that section 17 of the 1974 Act gives to approved codes.
| Standard | What HSE says it covers | The standard is that… |
|---|---|---|
| Demands | "issues such as workload, work patterns, and the work environment" | "employees indicate that they are able to cope with the demands of their jobs" |
| Control | "how much say the person has in the way they do their work" | "employees indicate that they are able to have a say about the way they do their work" |
| Support | "the encouragement, sponsorship and resources provided by the organisation, line management and colleagues" | "employees indicate that they receive adequate information and support from their colleagues and superiors" |
| Relationships | "promoting positive working to avoid conflict and dealing with unacceptable behaviour" | "employees indicate that they are not subjected to unacceptable behaviours, eg bullying at work" |
| Role | "whether people understand their role within the organisation and whether the organisation ensures that the person does not have conflicting roles" | "employees indicate that they understand their role and responsibilities" |
| Change | "how organisational change (large or small) is managed and communicated in the organisation" | "employees indicate that the organisation engages them frequently when undergoing an organisational change" |
Each of those six standards has a second half, and it is identical in all six: "systems are in place locally to respond to any individual concerns."
Read the two limbs together and the shape of the thing changes. The first limb is about how people experience the work. The second is about whether there is anywhere for a concern to go when they raise one. An organisation can score respectably on the first and have nothing at all behind the second, and the gap between them is where most of the practical failure in this area happens: someone said something, and there was no route.
It is also the limb that survives contact with an actual case. Foreseeability turns on what an employer knew or ought reasonably to have known, and a local system for responding to concerns is both how you come to know and how you demonstrate that knowledge went somewhere.
Three points, all from HSE's own pages, and all of them cut against the way the Standards are usually sold.
HSE does not expect full attainment. In its own words: "HSE does not expect an employer to meet all the standards. They represent a target for the organisation, goals that employers should be working towards through an ongoing process of risk assessment and continuous improvement." HSE elsewhere calls them "by necessity… high level and aspirational".
There is no score to hit. The "85%" and "65%" figures that circulate as Management Standards targets came from a 2004 pilot, and the HSE authors who published them wrote that "the 85% and 65% thresholds used in the pilot were essentially based on research that was indicative, rather than grounded", with expert workshops splitting "almost 50/50 for and against inclusion". No target percentage appears on any current HSE Management Standards page, and the free HSE Analysis Tool produces no benchmark or percentile at all.
And no survey is required to work through them. HSE: "The Management Standards approach suggests using a survey as one (but not the only) source of information… A survey is not an essential step and for smaller organisations it would not be proportionate to run such a survey, particularly where the same data can be gathered in other ways."
The Indicator Tool is a 35-item questionnaire, items 1 to 23 on a five-point frequency scale and items 24 to 35 on a five-point agreement scale, asking about the last six months.
One structural detail worth carrying into any conversation with a supplier: it does not produce six scores. Factor analysis split Support into two factors by source, so the instrument maps to seven subscales: demands, control, managerial support, peer support, relationships, role and change. Six Standards, seven scales. A dashboard showing six scores from these 35 items has merged something, and the two support scales are exactly the ones you would not want merged, because "my manager" and "my colleagues" are different problems with different fixes.
HSE positions the tool carefully. It gives "a broad indication to organisations of how well their workforce rate their performance", and "the results of the survey alone can only provide an indication of performance". It was named an indicator tool "in recognition of the known limitations of structured questionnaires". It measures perceptions of working conditions across a workforce, and it does not measure any individual's health.
The Talking Toolkit is the other one, and it is the better starting point for most organisations that are not already running surveys. Six conversation templates, one per Standards area. HSE built them "for smaller organisations so they can gather data that larger organisations may gather through surveys", and says the conversations "can replace the 'focus group' element of the Management Standards approach". Its structure is not prescriptive: "There is no strict format for these conversations, or how line managers should conduct them."
HSE attaches one caveat to the Toolkit and it is worth quoting exactly, because it is narrower than the paraphrases: it "should not be used in isolation as an employer's only response if there is an existing problem with work-related stress in the organisation". Not "this is not a risk assessment". HSE positions it as a step towards developing the actions and the stress risk assessment employers need.
HSE's steer is organisational rather than individual, and it says so in the first step of its own approach: "first focus on organisational level issues… It is more effective to remove a stressor or significantly reduce its impact than it is to manage lots of individual cases."
That is the sentence to reach for when a wellbeing programme is being proposed as the answer to a demands problem. The Standards describe conditions of work design, and none of the six names a service you can buy.
To the law: they are one recognised way of discharging the regulation 3 duty, and using them is the most defensible route, but not the only one.
To psychosocial risk: the six areas are HSE's own vocabulary for it, and psychosocial risk at work sets out the duty they sit under, what is known about the scale of the problem, and what the law does not require.
To ISO 45003: the international guidance standard groups psychosocial hazards into aspects of work organisation, social factors at work, and the work environment, equipment and hazardous tasks. Where you need worked examples of hazards, the Standards are the better source in Great Britain, because they are free and written for this regulatory context. ISO's own detailed hazard tables sit behind a paywall.
To the campaign material you may have seen: HSE's Working Minds campaign presents a "5 Rs" framing, Reach out, Recognise, Respond, Reflect and Make it routine, which routes users to the same underlying artefacts. It is a communications wrapper over the Standards, not a replacement for them.
Nothing supersedes the Standards as at August 2026. The six domain pages, the index, the overview, the Indicator Tool and the Talking Toolkit are all still current on HSE's site, and no replacement framework or revised standard set has been published.
The Standards tell you what to look at. They do not tell you what a record has to contain to survive scrutiny, which is a separate question and the one most organisations get wrong. That is covered in psychosocial risk assessment: what HSE actually expects, and the record itself in the duty of care checklist.
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