April is Stress Awareness Month, with work-related stress a significant issue affecting workers in the UK, now is the time to act. In 2020/21, The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found that 17.9 million working days were lost due to work-related stress, depression, or anxiety. This accounted for 55% of all working days lost due to ill health. Clearly, this is a major problem that all employers need to address proactively, so how do we do that?
It’s NOT about Mental Health First Aid
All too often I find employers want to talk about introducing Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) training, without having an overarching wellness policy, or without a clear understanding of the limitations of MHFA.
Let’s start by agreeing that nobody expects a physical first-aider to repair broken bones or carry out regular physical health examinations on people at work. We all understand that the role of physical first-aiders is to provide basic care until professional help is available.
The same is true for MHFA. The role is not to provide a counselling or therapy service to colleagues, it is simply to help in a mental health crisis. I’ll write more on this topic in a later blog, but suffice to say, MHFA is a part of your strategy for employee wellbeing, it is not the strategy.
So, what can employers do to help reduce the risk of work-related stress among their UK-based employees?
Avoid tokenism
Employers who implement wellbeing initiatives in the workplace risk being seen as tokenistic if they don’t approach the issue in a genuine and thoughtful way. Take a strategic approach to wellbeing to avoid this issue. Providing on-site massage / yoga / mindfulness / MHFA are all well and good, but if you have a culture of bullying it needs to be addressed. If you run annual awareness days but do not have a wellbeing strategy you will be giving your people the wrong message.

How to address stress in your workplace
- Understand the areas of concern in your business: we are all working with limited resources, so if we want to address work-related stress effectively it’s important to understand how big a problem it is. Are there particular departments that have high employee turnover, or sickness absence? Are you aware of a culture of working long hours in certain areas? Look at the data you already have, carry out an employee engagement survey and review the six main areas that can lead to work-related stress if they are not managed properly. These are: demands, control, support, relationships, role and change, as defined by the HSE.
- Engage senior leaders to champion stress and mental health: if you want people to talk about stress and mental health at work, senior leaders need to be seen supporting your initiatives. If senior leaders don’t talk about their own stress and wellbeing the message received is still one of stigma and shame.
- Address the root causes of stress: Once you understand the areas to address create a policy and implementation plan, addressing the work environment and job demands you have identified. This may include reducing workload, providing management training,, or improving communication and collaboration within and across teams.
- Train managers to recognise the signs of stress and how to initiate supportive conversations: Employers should educate themselves and their managers on the signs of stress, such as increased absenteeism, decreased productivity, and changes in behaviour or mood. Managers should be trained to recognise these signs in their employees and offer support and resources to help.
- Develop mental health awareness among employees: As well as training managers to identify the first signs of a problem, employees will benefit from some awareness training too, and by learning tools and techniques to manage stress well.
- Encourage open communication: Employers need to create a culture of open communication, where employees feel comfortable talking to their managers about their stress levels and any issues that may be causing stress. Managers should also be encouraged to share their own experiences with stress and model healthy coping mechanisms.
- Offer resources and support: By providing resources and support to help your people manage stress you will help reduce sickness absence and high employee turnover. Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs), counselling services, and stress management workshops can all be helpful, as long as you are also addressing the causes of stress in your workplace. If you are not providing a safe working environment, all the resources in the world are not going to resolve the issue.
- Promote work-life balance: Do your managers encourage and model healthy working behaviours? By taking holidays, working during office hours only and avoiding the use of email outside of working hours your managers can get the message across.
- Measure and evaluate the impact: Any initiatives implemented need to be measured and evaluated to ensure they have a positive impact on your people. This can help to demonstrate a genuine commitment to employee wellbeing, rather than just paying lip service to the issue.
Ultimately, you want to create a psychologically safe culture, where everyone feels included, anyone can discuss mental health and raise concerns at all levels in the business.
April may well be stress awareness month, what are you doing for the rest of the year? Remember, work-related stress is a significant issue affecting workers in the UK. Employers have a responsibility to identify the signs of stress in the business, to provide resources and support for employees, to address the root causes of stress, and promote a healthy work-life balance. By taking these steps, you can create a positive work environment that supports employee wellbeing and productivity.