Stress at Work: a simple guide
Stress at work is a major problem. According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), 875,000 workers in Great Britain suffered work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2022/23. This caused 17.1 million lost working days — almost half 49% of all working days lost to work-related ill health.
This guide covers workplace stress — what it is, how to tackle it and when to seek help.
What is workplace stress?
To some degree, we’ve all probably experienced it. That buzz in the back of your head as a deadline approaches or emails pile up. Or you might feel uneasy in your stomach as an important presentation or pitch looms.
Often this is perfectly natural and a little of it can actually do you good — this is known as ‘optimal stress’.2 The shot of cortisol and adrenaline moderate stress causes can actually increase output and productivity.
However, the risks is that we pass our personal threshold for stress and never ‘come down’ from the peak.
The signs of stress at work
Given stress can rise to the point it becomes a problem, it’s important to recognise the signs as stress builds. These include:
- Becoming easily agitated or frustrated
- Mood swings
- Avoiding colleagues/personal interactions
- A loss of confidence/self-esteem
- Forgetfulness and difficulty focusing
- Being uncharacteristically pessimistic/negative
- Arriving late
- If they smoke, increased smoking breaks
- Missing deadlines
- Tiredness
- Becoming more prone to colds and infections
- Rapid weight fluctuations.
Unfortunately, hybrid working could make it more difficult for employers to spot employees struggling with their mental wellbeing due to reduced physical contact.
To get a clearer view on the risks of stress progressing into burnout and how building resilience can support with this, view our interactive infographic here.
Causes of stress at work
Recognising and knowing how to tackle stress is something all companies, big or small, need to prepare for. However, ideally employees would never become so stressed that it caused a situation that needs to be acknowledged and tackled.
It’s an old saying, but very relevant — prevention truly is better than cure. By the time an employee is so stressed it becomes a condition and causes sickness absence, the cost for them is already too great.
That’s why it’s important to know what the causes of stress are, so you can act on them early.
According to the HSE, the top causes of stress at work are:
- Being unable to cope with the demands of their job
- Lack of control over how to do their work
- Lack of information and support
- Difficulties with relationships at work, including bullying
- Not fully understanding their role and responsibilities
- Feeling disengaged as the business goes through change.
Why is this a problem?
As mentioned, in small doses and with proper recovery periods, stress can boost productivity. However, employees facing long-term, chronic stress can quickly become too unwell to work. This is too big a price to pay.
Not only can it lead to an employee or employees suffering sickness absence — which itself is unacceptable for a preventable problem — but reducing employees’ stress levels can boost morale, cut sickness absence and increase productivity.
76% of respondents to a Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) survey reported some stress-related absence within their organisation in the past 12 months. For large companies (with 250+ employees), this rises to 92%.
It’s clear to see why stress can impact employers’ bottom lines — sickness absence and presenteeism reduce the productivity employees. Meanwhile, 78% of employees who responded to a Unum-commissioned survey said that high levels of stress would be a factor in them seeking a new job.1
Tackling stress if it occurs
The first priority should be ensuring your company has a proper health and wellbeing policy. However, doing so can be daunting.
If you’re not sure where to start, Unum’s Workplace Health and Wellbeing Review can help. This examines your current mental health and wellbeing strategy in line with the government’s 'Thriving at Work' and the Mental Health at Work Commitment. We then provide an action plan of suggested improvements and 12 months of support and check-ins to help implement them.
Upskilling line managers is also crucial so they can spot signs of stress, be a sympathetic ear for employees experiencing it and know how to react to nip the problem in the bud.
With Unum, our range of On Course workshops form part of our focus on illness prevention. Every workshop aimed at line managers is CPD-accredited and include online learning e-modules, such as Stress Awareness. Here, you’ll learn about recognising stress, spotting the signs, managing it and your role as a line manager in keeping you and your team healthy.
What's the solution?
The overwhelming message from all this is that stress at work to the point it affects an employee’s wellbeing isn’t inevitable. Indeed, it’s preventable.
However, if stress occurs, it’s vital to support your employees through it. Internally, you can:
- Remind staff to take periods of rest and recovery, which includes lunch breaks
- Check employees take leave they’re entitled to. Annual leave is a health and safety requirement; it’s not just to jet off around the world and lie on beaches (as much as we’d like it to be!)
- Ensure managers lead by example and take their own leave without resorting to working from their sunlounger
- Encourage healthy use of digital technology so people can fully switch off outside work hours rather than remaining ‘always on’
- Be aware of workloads and intervene if an employee is facing unreasonable demands.
You could also choose to use experts from outside your organisation to help if you have such resources available when an employee starts to feel stressed.
It’s here an offering such as Unum’s Wellbeing Check could prove invaluable. This provides a 1-2-1 coaching session with an employee struggling with their wellbeing.
Many employee benefits, such as the Group Risk policies on offer from Unum, offer access to added-value services that offer a wealth of support in this area. For example, Help@hand,2 from Unum, the award-winning health and wellbeing app, offers multiple mental health and wellbeing support services in one place.
This includes unlimited counselling sessions with a mental health professional.3 We adopted the unlimited model of mental health support because it allowed the clinicians to tailor the number of sessions the user gets to their specific mental health needs. Users can also access the service at any time and for any reason, potentially using it earlier before problems worsen, because they don’t have to be concerned with using up all their sessions.
If every employer can put robust preventative measures in place, as well as offering avenues to treat stress should it occur, that headline figure for work-related stress absences may start to go down. This will benefit employers and employees alike.
1 Original quantitative research of UK employees was conducted by global research company Censuswide and was undertaken between 20th and 21st September 2023. In total, 4,035 UK employees (aged 16-69) were surveyed online, and results have been weighted to be nationally representative.
2 Help@hand from Unum services (the ‘Services’) are provided to Unum Limited (“Unum”) customers by third-party specialist providers chosen by Unum. Unum is not the provider of the Services. The Services are entirely separate from the insurance policy provided by Unum. Access to the Services is facilitated by Unum at no cost to the Unum customer, and Unum may change or withdraw access to the Services at any time. Use of the Services are subject to the terms and conditions of the relevant third-party specialist providers. Services are available to UK residents only. For further information, please go to unum.co.uk/frequently-asked-questions/services
3 For mild to moderate issues. Number of sessions subject to clinical appropriateness. Should the service be no longer suitable, users will be directed to alternative appropriate support