Dr Felicity Baker: How to immunise your organisation against the silent stress epidemic

With an astonishing 79% of UK employees regularly experiencing work-related stress, few organisations are escaping the impact. In fact, last year declining employee mental health led to £57.4 billion of lost productivity in Britain’s businesses. With this in mind, it is time for all businesses sit up and take note that turning a blind eye to struggling employees and the stress epidemic is no longer an option.

The so-called Silent Stress Epidemic can be thought of as the organisational equivalent of concrete cancer in buildings, silently undermining the strength and resilience of the organisation, largely going unnoticed until the cracks start to appear.

As human beings our natural empathy points towards offering support to people who are struggling. However, in the past a blame culture around mental health, has led to stress being perceived as a failing in the individual. And this has contributed to massive neglect both of the person struggling and the wider detrimental impact on organisational functioning and goal attainment.

In recent years we have started to see a reversal of this trend, with employee mental health creeping up the agenda and businesses recognising the value of pushing back against the Silent Stress Epidemic. In a MHFA survey, 29% of managers said more support and training from their employer would help them support other team members.

In this article I present the most effective strategies to manage the erosion of individual and team performance through rising stress, presenteeism and costly staff turnover. Derived from Ultimate Resilience’s published model of organisational resilience and drawing on psychological theory, these strategies are evidence-based and easy to implement.

Strategies to immunise your organisation 

Business success is completely reliant on employee health and wellbeing. If your people aren’t functioning, your business isn’t functioning.

And once your people are on the slippery slope of stress, it can be hard to get them back. The more stress an employee feels, the harder it is to think clearly and to function and this can lead to more stress. Throw in some unhelpful coping strategies such as overworking, working late at night, drinking too much caffeine, avoidance and procrastination and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

In my experience, many organisations have made attempts to address the impact of stress through stress management training, EAP and mental health support. However, these interventions are often applied too little and too late.

The most cost-effective way of dealing with stress is to prevent it in the first place. Prevention is far better than cure. And there are a number of effective evidence-based strategies that can help.

1. Understand the scale of the problem and deploy targeted interventions

Without data you have no idea of the extent to which the Silent Stress Epidemic poses a threat to your organisation. Listening, understanding and responding to the challenges staff face is the first step you need to take  to minimise the risk before it takes hold.

This strategy of assessment, formulation and action and evaluation are the key steps to immunising your organisation against stress  and building resilience outlined in the Interpersonal Process Model of Organisational Resilience outlined in Baker et al. (2023)⁴.

In this model, listening needs to be applied at all levels,  in 1-1 meetings, in team meetings and organisation wide.

Importantly though, listening is not enough.

Once you understand the scale of the problem it needs to be followed up by action. And this action needs to be based on your evidence, the data you have gathered about what people need. It’s no good putting in lunchtime yoga sessions, for example, if your employees are saying they don’t have the skills to use a new computer system!!

So the support needed to manage stress in your organisation will vary according to what your assessment has shown, whether that is a need for training, for support  through change, encouragement to rise to challenges or something else.

2. Ensure interventions are evidence-based

There’s no point trying to tackle employee stress with methods that don’t work. In fact, an ineffective intervention, or one that is not indicated as a need, could leave employees disillusioned and with worsening stress symptoms.

Selecting an evidence-based approach that has proven results is crucial to providing effective solutions. Science-backed initiatives that lead to demonstrable change are far more likely to achieve the positive impact you need.

At Ultimate Resilience we are all about taking an evidence-based approach. We developed the Skills-based Model of Personal Resilience to ensure we only offer interventions that we know work. And we use it to inform all our workplace training, coaching and supervision services.

The model draws on the academic literature about what it takes to be resilient. It provides a way of organising and understanding the skills needed to build resilience, and provides guidance on how to support clients to make lasting psychological change.

Importantly our model differs from other less scientifically informed interventions through its basis in robust psychological theory and practical application to training and coaching.

3. Take a flexible and accessible approach to support diverse and disparate workforces

In these economically tough times, maintaining high productivity and output is essential for business survival. Time is at a premium, and there often isn’t the bandwidth to release whole teams or large sections of your workforce to access support for stress. The shift to hybrid and flexible working has also created increasingly disparate workforces making it harder to bring people together for training and support.

For these reasons your strategy to immunise your organisation against the Silent Stress Epidemic must be:

• Easily accessible
• Flexible to fit around work demands
• Adaptable to accommodate individual needs or circumstances.

Initiatives that your people can access at a time, location and pace of their choosing will maximise accessibly, uptake and engagement, leading to greater overall impact.

This might mean providing training or support in a variety of ways, for example, in-person, online and through e-learning

Taking a tiered approach as recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) will also help you do this,  ensuring that a range of support and learning is available to meet the diversity of need across your organisation in a flexible way. This might include:

Tier 1 – Organisation-wide approaches

Interventions at this level build resilience capacity and provide a foundation for good mental wellbeing. Available to all employees these might include:

• Accessible resources and materials aimed at increasing awareness and building core skills to manage stress and improve mental wellbeing, for example, factsheets, newsletters or staff support meetings
• Measures to minimise sources of stress at work (e.g. workload reviews, regular 1-1’s, involving employees in consultation around change processes, drawing on early adopters to facilitate uptake of new approaches or technology)
• Routine mental health impact assessments on new procedures, policies and working practices

Tier 2 – Targeted approaches

Aimed at sub-groups or sections of the workforce who may be at higher risk of developing stress these approaches might include:

• Group training in resilience skills in a variety of formats such as in-person, online or e-learning.
• Equipping managers with core communication and coaching skills to talk with employees about wellbeing issues and signpost them to relevant support.
• Resilient leadership training to provide all leaders with the skills to promote resilience and wellbeing in their teams.

Tier 3 – Individual approaches

Aimed at employees who are struggling with mental health, wellbeing or personal issues these might include:

• Individualised support or coaching aimed at addressing their specific workplace needs.
• Wellbeing action plan developed in conjunction with the line manager or HR team.
• Professional support for leaders and HR professionals, a regular space for reflection and skill development.

4. Support your leaders

Prioritising staff wellbeing can be a challenge for many in leadership roles, with other pressures and priorities and who may not feel it is in their remit to ‘look after’ staff.

In fact data shows that many leaders and HR professionals are struggling with their own high levels of stress. In a  BUPA survey 77% business leaders reported experiencing at least one symptom of poor mental health in the last year and Deloitte found that at least 70% of C-suite leaders had seriously considered leaving their job for one with better wellbeing support.

When leaders’ stress goes unnoticed and with a lack of support, they may struggle to manage their own mental health and as a consequence will find it difficult to respond effectively to others who are struggling. This has a knock on effect on employees and team functioning as they don’t feel they have the time or emotional energy to check-in with staff. And this can open the door to the Silent Stress Epidemic for them and their employees.

Supporting your leaders will help to stem the rise of stress across your organisation. This might include:

• Training in resilience skills to help them manage their own and others’ stress
• Coaching skills to build confidence and tools to respond supportively to employees who may be struggling
• Resilience coaching to provide support to manage stress and burnout and put in place strategies to build personal resilience
• Resilience supervision, a preventative approach to ensure problems are dealt with before they become a problem

5. Use a data driven approach to ensure return on investment

You know that your people perform best when they’re not stressed, but the pressure to get the job done with ever decreasing time and resources can make this goal seem unattainable.

So it is crucial that you ensure your stress elimination strategy is really getting the results you want. Taking a data-driven approach from the outset is essential as this ensures focused investment, prioritising areas of greatest need and facilitates ongoing evaluation.

Administering standardised wellbeing measures will provide vital statistical insights into your stress elimination programme’s impact on the health and functioning of your people. Closely monitoring KPI metrics, sickness absence and retention figures will reveal its effect on wider business objectives.

These robust forms of data will demonstrate return on investment and guide future programme adaptation, whilst also revealing the degree of alignment between your stress prevention strategy and your employees’ needs.

6. Seek Credibility & Expertise

There’s so much noise in the wellbeing space right now, it can feel almost impossible to know where to start or which approach will work.

In this growing industry, numerous new companies offer an array of solutions. Often from business or tech backgrounds, they bring innovation but many lack sound psychological expertise.

To safeguard your organisation’s wellbeing effectively, be sure to partner with providers who have the right qualifications and experience.

Trained healthcare professionals bring vital clinical expertise, adhere to ethical standards and are backed by professional bodies for added assurance. This is crucial in managing and preventing the Silent Stress Epidemic. Professionals with a healthcare background have the know-how to work with employees who may be emotionally vulnerable to bring about lasting psychological change.

Looking for a provider with an established reputation, sound subject knowledge and proficiency in employee assessment is key. A trustworthy provider will showcase how their services are rooted in research evidence, offering tailored solutions to address your organisation’s specific challenges.

Summary

So if you want to develop a robust approach to immunise your organisation against the Silent Stress Epidemic taking a preventative approach by building individual and organisational resilience is essential. Ensuring the strategies described here are in place will protect you and your people now and in the future, immunising your organisation against stress and building resilience capacity over the longer term.