Do we really understand the drivers of work-related stress, asks Vanessa Sallows, group protection claims and governance director at Legal & General Retail.
Work-related stress seems to represent the scourge of our generation. And, despite a myriad of assumptions – and even some correlations – based on employee surveys, organisational audits and risk assessments, the underlying causation arguably remains elusive.
The statistics are hard to deny. The Health & Safety Executive’s (HSE) recently published data, shows that the rate of working days lost in Great Britain due to self-reported work-related stress, depression or anxiety remains broadly similar to last year; now 1.7 million for 2023/24, in comparison to 1.8 million in 2022/23. The current rate is still higher than the 2018/19 pre-pandemic level and stress, depression or anxiety still account for the majority of all working days lost due to work-related ill-health.
So, despite all the well-meaning efforts to mitigate work-related mental health issues, by a whole host of stakeholders, something’s not working.
Stress growing among the young
Firstly, it’s worth mentioning that the HSE data is not alone. Its findings are consistent with other recent, big pieces of research. For example, the CIPD’s latest health and wellbeing at work report found that stress played a significant role in both short- and long-term absences.
What’s more, stress seems to be a problem that is disproportionately impacting the younger generation. One in two gen-Zers (54 percent) globally say they’ve felt stressed to the point that they couldn’t go to work during the past year. Here, we’re talking about those with a working age of between 16 and 27 years old, as at 2024.
We also found this in our own data, in partnership with Fruitful Insights, which also revealed that, although the most financially stressed of all generations, happiness at work for this cohort is more about cultural factors than money.
Productivity impaired
In separate, and more recent research with Fruitful Insights, we found that work related stress is an important driver of impaired productivity. The report concluded that helping the UK working population reach both a level of high individual wellbeing (physical, financial and social, as well as emotional) and commitment, could generate as much as £34 billion in improved productivity per year.
However, this won’t be achieved through basing ‘solutions’ on subjective measures alone. Neither will it be achieved through striving for 100 percent productivity. This could, in fact, be counterproductive.
Zooming in on work-related stress specifically (although the same applies to all areas of wellbeing), subjective measures – such as job satisfaction – are used by most organisations to help with identifying where problem areas lie and implementing solutions.
However, while such measures can help show whether an organisation has a positive or negative overall wellbeing status, they don’t tell us why this is the case. In other words, they don’t cut to the core of the problem.
All about balance
This can lead to well-meaning employers providing all-of-workforce access to support and advice, which is great, but to be truly effective for people and business, this support needs to be balanced by a focus on addressing the root causes.
Fruitful’s analysis found that cultural factors, such as control over workload, feeling valued, having supportive managers and colleagues, were all contributory factors to the root cause.
For example, comparing responses from employees who ‘definitely agree’ or ‘definitely disagree’ that their managers are supportive, productivity loss for those without supportive managers – calculated at £9,800 – is double that of employees with supportive managers, at £4,800. It’s a very similar picture to this where employees feel that they do or don’t have supportive colleagues too.
It’s important to bear in mind here though that 100 percent productivity is a myth.
Mike Tyler, chairman and co-founder of Fruitful Insights, which partners with Legal & General to provide clients with data and analytics, says: “It would be impossible to get productivity loss to zero. Thinking you can, might only inadvertently lead to issues such as work-related stress and burnout.
“The important point is that the most satisfied employees have a much lower level of productivity loss than the very dissatisfied employees. So, our focus should be on bringing the tail up; focusing on where people are dissatisfied, as opposed to expecting 100 percent.”
All of this, of course, brings obvious implications for business and economic growth. It also brings implications for many aspects of working life, from employee engagement and experience to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social and governance (ESG).
There are obvious implications for the younger cohort. But there are also important implications at all ages simply from an ‘enjoying good work’ perspective.
It’s our philosophy that good work is beneficial for health. Indeed, this is a philosophy hardwired into everything we do from prevention and early intervention to vocational rehabilitation. Good work is beneficial for health. It’s as simple as that. So, getting to the root cause of what good work looks like and how to get there, should arguably represent the focus of all organisations. In turn, helping get those working days lost statistics down, while bringing the tail up productivity-wise.
