Stress policy

• The Danske Bank Group wants to help ensure that all employees maintain a healthy work-life balance.
• Managers and employees have a shared responsibility for reacting to over-exertion and stress in time.
• If an employee still becomes stressed, we will do our best to maintain his or her relation to the Group.
  
  

Positive and negative stress
Stress can be either positive or negative, and our experience often depends on maintaining a balance between the demands that we address and the resources we have to meet them. All of us may become stressed to a greater or lesser extent. In some periods, we are affected by what is taking place in our environment, but when we are exposed to stress for a prolonged period, it may affect our health and result in serious physical and mental problems.

A complete life
The relationship between working life and personal life has a strong effect on our mental condition at work. It is beneficial to have a satisfying personal life and to be able to separate the two spheres. Personal life is not a petrol station where we fill ourselves with energy for the next working day – it is a part of life that is important in itself.

The Group wants to contribute to ensuring a balance between job, family and leisure time. Laptops, mobile phones and the like make it possible for us to work around the clock, but that is not the intention or objective. The Group provides these tools to enable staff members to work in a flexible way and organise their working days around their needs, perhaps including personal errands or family duties.

Shared responsibility
All employees and managers have a shared responsibility for ensuring that no one gets into a situation in which stress has adverse health effects. So, regardless of whether we are staff members or business partners, we all must contact the employee in question or his or her superior so that the necessary steps can be taken.

As part of a business, we cannot avoid stress, but we can make an effort to reduce it and jointly develop a culture that promotes openness about stress and its potential consequences. We therefore provide a range of tools to enable managers and employees to react as quickly as possible.


Last updated on 5 October 2007