International Stress Awareness Week is taking place this year between 3 and 7 November, with Stress Awareness Day on 5 November. This presents an ideal opportunity for employers to review the measures they have in place to deal with stress at work and promote them to their workforce.

My client operates in the cybersecurity sector, a high pressure industry, especially with recent high profile cyber attacks against large businesses. They recognise that their employees are under a lot of stress, and they want to put in place effective measures to help their employees manage and deal with it. What can you recommend?

Stress can have serious and damaging short and long-term effects on individuals, their friends and families, and their work. Employers should look at measures they can introduce into the workplace to prevent and manage stress at work and make sure their staff are taking care of themselves, and looking out for their colleagues, to avoid the negative repercussions of stress in the workplace.

According to the CIPD Health and Wellbeing Report, in partnership with SimplyHealth, published in September 2025 and based on a survey of 1,101 HR professionals and management-level employees with major HR decision-making involvement or influence in their organisation, 64% of respondents reported some stress-related absence in their organisation over the last year.

Heavy workload was one of the most common causes of stress related absences and management style also ranked highly among the main causes of stress related absence, the research found.

There are numerous measures organisations can implement to alleviate and prevent harmful stress in the workplace. Developing a range of measures to support staff is good practice, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, as different things will work for different people.

Ultimately, creating an organisational culture that promotes mental and physical wellbeing and enables employees to recognise and control their own stress triggers can be the best defence to stress in the workplace.

Effective measures can include:

• Helping employees to better manage their work-life balance through offering flexible working options, and having relevant policies and documentation in place to make this process as straightforward as possible
• Providing access to an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) offering support and guidance on a wide variety of issues
• Identifying the causes of stress through staff surveys, focus groups, etc, and seeking employee input into how these can be managed more effectively  
• Conducting stress risk assessments and acting on what is found
• Training line managers to identify when those working under them are struggling with stress so that they can signpost what is available in the organisation to support them, as well as on how to take steps to help their staff to manage stress at work  
• Training line managers on the impact their management style can have on those working with them, and how to adapt it to reduce the risk of it leading to harmful stress in others
• Having a written specific stress management policy, or a policy more generally dealing with employee wellbeing and mental health
• Carrying out return to work meetings for all absences and using them to identify if stress has been a factor in the absence, and using this to trigger targeted actions with the employee relating to stress

According to the CIPD report, many employers are still taking a reactive, rather than proactive, approach to dealing with stress.

Whilst providing support to employees who have already become unwell and are in need of help is an important part of stress management, it is vital that organisations also take proactive steps to promote good mental health and manage stress at work, by taking preventative steps before harmful stress can arise and  prioritising early intervention.

This could be by promoting health benefits and services, and encouraging staff to be open about stress at work with their managers and colleagues so harmful stress can be prevented and issues leading to it can be resolved before they can do lasting damage.

By Stacie Cheadle, technical writer, Croner-i

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