Rethinking Stress at Work: Designing Healthier, More Sustainable Workplaces

Leeds Mindful Employer Network Project Lead, Leigh Staunton, recently attended the Health & Wellbeing at Work Conference at the NEC Birmingham, focusing on sessions that echoed the themes and challenges emerging from employers across our Network.

This feature is part of Leeds Mindful Employer Network's new 'In Practice' series, where we bring together insights from the Conference and real experiences from Leeds-based employers to offer practical guidance and tools you can use right now.

As we approach Stress Awareness Month (April), we’re turning our attention to workload and pressure — and what meaningful, effective support can look like in workplaces today. Three sessions in particular reshaped our thinking about how stress shows up at work. In this In Practice article, Leigh shares her key takeaways from these seminars.

Let's start with the biggest takeaway of all across the seminars.

We’re still too focused on the individual — and not enough on the system.

Most approaches to workplace stress still focus on the individual employee’s resilience, time management, coping strategies. The strongest message from the sessions I attended was this: if we want to reduce stress at work, we need to look more closely at how work itself is designed.

Stress is a workplace risk — not just a personal issue

A session delivered by Barry Wilkes and Pheobe Smith of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) reframed stress as something that should be managed like any other workplace hazard.

Rather than being reactive and non-compulsory, Wilkes and Smith affirmed that workplace stress is something that must be:

– assessed – monitored – prevented

Too often, organisations rely on measures that are reactive, such as occupational health referrals and sickness absence, by which point harm has already occurred.

What was useful here is that this isn’t purely abstract or theoretical; there are already many tools available to help employers approach stress management at work properly.

The HSE Management Standards Framework gives a structured way to look at the root causes of stress, things like demands, control, support and relationships, rather than just the outcomes.

There are also: – risk assessment templates– stress indicator tools– “Talking Toolkits”, including industry-specific toolkits for construction, education and NHS roles.

The shift is simple, but significant:

Workload is the problem (and we know it)

A second session, delivered by Dr Rachel Lewis of Affinity Health at Work, focused on excessive work demands and spoke frankly to the problem of workload rather than sugar-coating the situation. Delegates discovered:

The UK has a workload problem.

– Longer working hours than neighbouring countries across Europe – Shorter breaks (now averaging around 17 minutes compared to a 1 hour 4 minute average in the 1970s) – Increasing number of us are doing roles with cognitive and emotional demands

And yet, most workplace responses still focus on the individual when it comes to supporting the issue of workload management:

– prioritisation techniques – productivity methods – time management

These can help at the margins, to a degree, but the evidence shared by Affinity Health at Work was clear:

These actions don’t solve the problem if the system itself is overloaded

What was particularly helpful was how this was framed through Affinity’s Working Well Framework, which looks at workplace wellbeing through the lens of exposure to psychosocial hazards — including excessive workload, emotional demands and lack of recovery time.

Rather than asking “How do we help people cope?”, the framework pushes organisations to ask:

“Where are people being exposed to risk in the way work is designed?”

This links closely with the wider evidence shared in the session that:

– demands deplete energy – resources support people to cope and perform

So, the focus shifts to reducing harmful exposure and strengthening the conditions that enable people to do their jobs well.

Affinity’s research combining large-scale evidence reviews with real-world organisational trials points to a more systemic approach.

Another useful model referenced was Affinity's IGLOO framework, a practical, evidence-based tool to promote health wellbeing and inclusion at work. It looks at wellbeing across:

– Individual – Group – Leader – Organisation

By viewing health and work through a multi-level lens, IGLOO empowers users to identify practical actions and align them with their goals.

The successful and sustainable actions shared to reflect what employers have found to have helped were practical and realistic:

– reducing unnecessary internal communications – setting clearer expectations around tools like Slack – introducing protected “focus time” across the organisation – making changes that are effective but small enough to “survive the worst day at work”

The wider evidence base referenced in the session (including reports by HSE and Deloitte) reinforces this:

The biggest wellbeing gains come from prevention — through better job design and managing demands

In other words: fix the work, not just the worker

Managers are carrying more than we realise

A third session, delivered by Dr Anjuli Amin, Clinical Psychologist at Modern Health, explored how managers can support teams through stressful world events.

This is something that feels increasingly relevant.

We’re operating in a context where:

Managers are expected to respond accordingly often without the time, training or confidence to do so.

There are also increasing resources available to support managers directly — including: – Stress management competency indicators– Guides to managing people experiencing mental health difficulties – tools to help spot early signs of stress

– The CALMER Framework (to help support yourself or others with an emotionally challenging situation).

The thread that connects across all three

Across all three sessions, the same pattern kept coming up:

Stress is more than just pressure. It’s about mismatch.

Mismatch between: – demands and resources – expectations and clarity – responsibility and support

And importantly, any of the solutions already exist — they’re just not always being used consistently

Reflection

What stood out most was how closely this mirrors what employers are telling us locally through the Network.

There’s no shortage of intent.

But often: – systems haven’t caught up – managers are stretched – interventions are still too focused on the individual

What this conference reinforced is that we don’t necessarily need more ideas — we need to apply the ones we already have, more deliberately and with greater intention.

Call to action

As we head into Stress Awareness Month, with your workplace in mind,  it might be worth considering:

Read more about Stress Awareness Month

Check out the Stress Awareness Month Resources Hub

Read more from the 'In Practice' series