Wellbeing | Are you taking a proactive approach to workplace stress?

Ahead of stress awareness month this April, business leaders and managers should be evaluating how to successfully support their workforce with addressing and tackling workplace stress.

Last year the HSE integrated questions relating to work-related stress into their Covid spot checks as part of their routine inspections to ensure organisations were operating safely. The pandemic is thought to have played a role in increasing occurrences of work-related stress, with the HSE’s 2020/21 figures revealing that stress, depression or anxiety account for 50% of all work-related ill health. While it is true that a certain level of pressure can be good for a person’s performance, too much can cause stress which is detrimental to their health and wellbeing - as well as costly to a business in the form of mistakes, loss of productivity and absenteeism.

Stress awareness

One of the challenges of spotting stress in your employees is that everyone handles and reacts to stress differently. Whereas indicators such as high absence rates, uncharacteristic behaviours, and lack of concentration or commitment can point to a stressed employee, it is possible for employees to show very few signs at all or only open up when they are at breaking point. On top of that, every individual will have a different level of workplace stress they are able to tolerate. So what can organisations do to address this?