The Hidden Cost of Stress

Workplace health and wellbeing has become a familiar agenda item. Organisations roll out Wellbeing programmes, appoint Mental Health First Aiders, and share tips on sleep, diet, and exercise with their employees. Some even invest in yoga at lunchtimes. Yet behind the glossy initiatives lies a more uncomfortable truth: stress isn’t just an individual issue. It is contagious. And when left unchecked, it seeps into culture, magnifies through leadership behaviours, and impacts performance across the whole organisation.

 

Last week, Sarah Clarke, Business Psychologist, delivered an engaging webinar in conjunction with Marsh McLennan and the IOD, focused on building resilient cultures and the ROI for wellbeing. During the session, we shared a simple but powerful tool.

 

The Stress Bucket

 

Many Mental Health First Aiders are taught about the “stress bucket” model and shown how it can be used in the workplace. The idea is that each of us carries an invisible bucket into which stressors drip every day, this could be deadlines, family pressures, financial worries, unresolved conflict, or even health concerns.

 

The list is endless and unique and it is not possible to compare stresses with each other, just how full your bucket is. Because when the bucket overflows, our ability to cope can collapse, and this is the time when we need help.

 

So how do we use the bucket?

 

The first step is awareness:

 

• What’s filling my bucket? Think about what pressures are urgent, or what am I worrying about unnecessarily?

 

• How am I responding? Consider what behaviours, feelings, and warning signs show up when I am under strain?

 

• Who else is affected? Stress is rarely silent. Colleagues, families, and teams often feel it long before we admit it to ourselves.

 

Next comes release, in terms of reducing the build up when it is not possible to prevent it. There are helpful and unhelpful forms of release.

 

Helpful, or positive drains include hobbies, meditation, talking with friends, coaching or counselling.

 

Unhelpful, or negative drains include alcohol, overworking, eating sugar, drinking energy drinks or drugs. All of which may give short-term relief but can add more weight to the bucket especially over time when people become reliant on them.

 

Stress is Infectious – Especially in Leadership

Humans are wired to pick up on other people’s stress as part of our survival instincts. In the workplace, this means leaders’ stress doesn’t stay in their own bucket, no matter how much they try to hide of disguise it.

 

Stress will pour into everyone else’s buckets. Especially when leader’s haven’t been training in managing their own emotions and behaviours. A leader’s tone in a meeting, their late-night emails, or even their silence can ripple through teams giving signals of stress.

 

Over time, this creates cultures of hyper-vigilance, low trust, and burnout. Because a leader hiding stress isn’t the answer. This will only cause their own burnout more likely which will then impact the team further.

 

This is why leaders must take responsibility for their own stress management. Not only for their personal wellbeing, but because unmanaged stress magnifies and multiplies organisational risk.

 

Positive vs. Negative Stress

It’s important to remember that not all stress is bad. Positive stress, sometimes called eustress, fuels productivity, sharpens focus, and stretches people to grow. Deadlines can drive creativity. Pressure can encourage innovation.

But when stress tips into the negative, (known as distress), the effects are corrosive:

 

• Performance deteriorates
• Productivity drops as presenteeism rises
• Control and influence are lost to reactivity
• Resilience weakens, leaving people more vulnerable to future pressures
• Culture becomes fragile, with fear or disengagement spreading

 

The line between positive and negative stress is thin, and managing it requires conscious effort at both the individual and organisational level.

 

A culture of psychological safety is paramount to ensure people feel supported and able to voice concerns, opinions and ideas for improvements.

 

Organisational Impact of Stress

Often, wellbeing is framed as the  individual’s responsibility: meditate more, sleep better, download another mindfulness app. It is down to the individual to take steps to relieve stress, and whilst these tools can have value, they can at times create more stress.

 

People become despondent when they maybe don’t work, or feel even more of a failure when they struggle to meditate. Because all these solutions overlook a deeper question: what impact does mental health and wellbeing have on the organisation itself? And what is the organisations doing to mitigate and reduce unnecessary stress?

 

Let us consider some of the knock-on effects of stress.

 

1. Financial Impact – rising absence rates, higher employee turnover and increased health or insurance costs, all impact the organisation financially.
2. Reputation Risk – employees tend to avoid companies known to be highly stressful, and top talent often leave high-stress cultures as they can succeed elsewhere, with rising prosecutions and increased social media impact the risk to reputations of stress is increasing.
3. Productivity Reduces – because teams tend to lose focus when there is stress, gossip increases and people behave in ways to protect their backs, and prove they are worthy, plus creativity and collaboration suffer as short term quick wins often become the focus, as opposed to longer term returns.
4. Increased Risk – as people often struggle to make informed decisions, preferring to make quick decisions, often focused on reducing the workload or not have time to collaborate, leads to increased risks
5. Deteriorating Culture – because stress spreads across organisation and through teams, eroding trust and reducing psychological safety. Because people don’t feel like they are safe in high stress environments, which leads to a lack of belonging and more defensive or protective behaviours, than a supportive productive culture.

 

This is why it is vital to see well-being as not a perk, but a strategic priority for all organisations.

 

Organisations Can Proactively Reduce Negative Stress

Instead of letting negative stress grow and build it is important that organisations take more proactive steps to prevent it from taking hold in the first place.

 

Leaders and organisations which shift the narrative from surface-level initiatives to deeper, systemic action can improve productivity, increase profits and ensure they retain talented employees.

 

Steps to deliver this include:

 

1. Lead By Example & Normalise Conversations: by encouraging open, non-judgemental dialogue about stress and pressure, listening to feedback and role modelling support, coaching and empowerment as a leader.
2. Train All Leaders in Self-Management: because to equip them to recognise their own stress, manage it constructively, and avoid passing it down the line helps ensure employees learn how to do this through role modelling behaviours.
3. Design Organisations, Jobs & Roles Better: Because many organisational structures are not fit for purpose, which means stress is already being created which employees cannot solve or reduce themselves. This includes aligning workloads, clarifying priorities, and ensuring all teams have autonomy where possible and clear communication channels.
4. Build Supportive Inclusive Cultures: It is important to foster trust, create space for psychological safety to grow, and ensure inclusion so people don’t feel alone in managing pressure. Having humans at work who care is vital, and to do this they need to not be working in highly stressed states.
5. Offer Multiple Release Valves: Everyone is an individual and will prefer different solutions. Flexible working, supportive line managers and clear guidelines and expectations all help ensure it is possible for employees to saefly release stress without creating added stress. Additional support such a coaching, counselling, flexible working or wellbeing programmes can also help, assuming they are all tailored to suit the organisation, teams and individuals because not one-size-fits-all.

 

Conclusion

The one thing which has remain constant with all organisations the Think team work with is that – stress is inevitable but burnout is not.

 

We can all cope with stress for a limited period of time. Some people thrive on it. But the real issue with health and wellbeing in the workplace is not whether people feel stress, but how leaders and organisations respond to it.

 

By focusing not only on individual coping strategies but also on systemic cultural shifts, businesses can move from firefighting to future-proofing.

 

Afterall, when leaders empty their buckets constructively, they give their teams the space to thrive.

 

Reach out to book a bespoke webinar for your team.