Article Summary
- Why workplace stress is increasingly shaped by leadership, culture and how work is organised, rather than individuals coping alone.
- How line managers and leaders influence stress through workload, communication, support and the day-to-day experience of work.
What organisations can do to reduce stress more effectively by focusing on culture, job design and the fundamentals of healthy work.
Stress Awareness Month will bring a familiar wave of advice about looking after ourselves at work. Much of it will be useful but if organisations are serious about stress they need to ask a harder question than how individuals can cope better. They need to ask what it is about work itself that is making people unwell.
That is where Investors in People has long taken a different view. Stress is often shaped by the way work is designed and managed: workloads, role clarity, communication, line management and trust.
The Health and Safety Executive reports that 964,000 workers in Great Britain suffered from work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25, accounting for 22.1 million working days lost.1 Workplace stress now sits firmly within the wider conversation about performance, resilience and organisational effectiveness. Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology, has put the consequences starkly: “When somebody’s off with depression or anxiety they’re off two or three times longer than if they have cancer.”
Investors in People’s own wellbeing research has also warned that too many organisations focus on the symptoms rather than the causes. In When the Perks Don’t Work IIP argues that employers often default to visible wellness solutions while overlooking more fundamental drivers of wellbeing such as management, leadership, workload and flexibility.
Why workplace stress matters more than ever
The case for taking workplace stress seriously is no longer difficult to make. The harder task is responding in a way that goes beyond surface-level support.
Stress affects absence, productivity and engagement but its impact runs deeper. It changes how people experience work, makes collaboration harder, slows decision-making and weakens performance over time. It can also erode trust when pressure feels constant and nobody is addressing why.
The World Health Organization makes the point clearly. Work can support mental health but it can also damage it when conditions are poor.2 WHO identifies risks including workload, job content, work schedules, low support, unclear roles and organisational culture. In other words, stress at work is often rooted in the conditions in which people are being asked to perform.
What really causes stress at work
There is still a strong tendency in organisations to frame stress as an individual resilience issue. People are encouraged to manage pressure better, use wellbeing resources or seek support when things become difficult. Those responses have a place but they do not deal with the upstream causes.
In practice stress is often generated by how work is organised: unclear priorities, excessive workloads, constant change with little explanation, too little control over how work gets done, environments where people do not feel able to raise concerns, poor communication and inconsistent management.
This broader understanding sits firmly within IIP’s own approach. The We invest in wellbeing framework treats wellbeing as something shaped by the whole experience of work, including work-life balance, communication, the working environment and the wider culture people encounter every day.
NICE makes a similar point in its guidance on mental wellbeing at work, recommending supportive and inclusive environments, training for managers and a preventive approach rather than waiting until problems escalate.
Once stress is understood in this way, the question changes. It becomes not just how to help people recover but how to reduce the organisational conditions making stress more likely in the first place.
How leadership and line management affect employee stress
If stress is shaped by how work is organised then leadership and line management sit at the heart of the issue.
Managers influence the day-to-day reality of work more than any policy document ever can. They decide how priorities are set, how workloads are distributed, whether expectations are clear, how change is communicated and whether people feel safe enough to say they are struggling.
The external evidence here is strong. CIPD’s 2025 Health and wellbeing at work research found that heavy workloads remain one of the most common causes of stress-related absence. It also found that organisations that train line managers on mental health are more likely to report managers feel confident having sensitive conversations and signposting support.
This echoes IIP’s view on management and wellbeing. How people are managed day to day can make or break a wellbeing strategy. It is where workplace stress becomes unmistakably a leadership issue. Pressure does not become harmful only because demand is high. It becomes harmful when people have little clarity, little voice, little support and little sense that anyone is paying attention to what the pressure is doing.
Moving beyond perks: what really reduces stress at work
Many organisations have put more energy into wellbeing over recent years. Employee assistance programmes, mindfulness sessions, apps, workshops and awareness campaigns have become increasingly common. Many are useful, the problem comes when they are expected to do too much heavy lifting.
The cost of getting this wrong is not always captured in absence data alone. As Gethin Nadin, CIO of Benefex and an expert on workplace wellbeing, has noted: “The cost of presenteeism now far outweighs the cost of people not even being in the workplace.” When people continue working while mentally unwell, the effects often show up more quietly through poorer concentration, lower productivity, weaker decision-making and reduced innovation.
One of the strongest insights from When the Perks Don’t Work is that employees often place greater value on the fundamentals of a healthy working environment than on more visible wellness interventions. The research found that flexible working, supportive management and rewards and recognition were among the initiatives employees believed would most improve their wellbeing, while stress management workshops and office nutrition programmes ranked much lower.
Reducing stress in practice often comes back to a few fundamentals: good management, clear expectations, open communication, genuine employee voice and realistic approaches to workload and flexibility. These are leadership and cultural choices, and they shape whether pressure feels manageable or relentless.
Questions every organisation should ask about workplace stress
Stress Awareness Week is a useful moment to pause, but it should also be a moment to challenge comfortable assumptions:
- Do we really understand what is causing stress here or are we guessing?
- Are managers equipped to talk about workload, pressure and wellbeing with confidence?
- Do people feel safe enough to speak up before stress becomes harmful?
- Are we investing more in visible interventions than in fixing the underlying experience of work?
- Are we measuring whether our wellbeing efforts are changing how work feels rather than simply adding to the list of what is on offer?
Stress at work cannot be removed entirely. Good work stretches people, challenges them and helps them grow. But when stress becomes constant and unmanaged it tells leaders something important about the way work is being run.
The We invest in wellbeing framework offers a useful lens here. It encourages organisations to treat wellbeing as something built into the way work is led, managed and improved over time. In practice, that means focusing on the conditions people need to stay well and perform at their best.
Sources
- HSE, Work-related stress, depression or anxiety statistics in Great Britain, 2025 https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/assets/docs/stress.pdf
- World Health Organization, Mental health at work https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-health-at-work
- National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, Mental wellbeing at work https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng212
- CIPD, Health and wellbeing at work, 2025 https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/knowledge-hub/reports/2025-pdfs/8920-Health-and-wellbeing-report-2025-/
