Employee Stress – Who Pays?
If you are an employer, the answer is simple - you do. A recent survey calculates the cost of stress to business to be, on average, over £1,000 per year for every employee in the UK (See SCMH Survey - PDF). Sometimes this is visible through staff turnover or absence from work - stress and its consequences are the most common causes of work absence in the UK - but usually it isn’t because employees are at work, but underperforming. If this is an average cost, then if your employees are paid more than the national average, or the nature of the work is more stressful than average, or if the employee is more susceptible to stress than average, then this cost will be considerably higher.
You may have taken all reasonable steps to minimise stress arising in the workplace – see Support Services. But, if your employees are stressed from personal issues, that will have the same cost consequences to your organisation. So, you have a decision to make: are you going to pay to ignore employee stress or are you going to pay to deal with it?
Effective screening by interview, survey, etc helps to target support to those who most need it so that it is highly cost effective. The logic runs as follows: if stress costs you, on average, over £1,000 per year, per employee and 25% of your employees are stressed, then if you spend less than £4,000 per head identifying that 25% and dealing with the stress, then your investment pays back in less than a year. Real life isn’t quite so black and white, of course, but you get the idea.
If you think Stress Management services might benefit your organisation, please contact me. Even if you do not have an allocated a budget for Occupational Health or Wellbeing, please download this poster for display in the workplace or distribution by e-mail, if you think it might be of interest to your employees.