PROFESSOR DYLAN JONES-EVANS

Last year, one of the most popular articles from my weekly column for the Western Mail examined happiness in the workplace and the growing realisation by many organisations that a failure to look after your workforce could impact performance and profitability. And this important issue of wellbeing in the workplace looks set to continue with many organisational analysts suggesting that it will be one of the key trends affecting business in 2018. In fact, with one in six workers being affected by anxiety and depression, this is becoming an issue not for individual organisations but for the UK economy as whole. This is not surprising given that there is increasing evidence of high staff turnover in a growing number of industries that is being caused by high levels of stress and burnout amongst employees. In the past, most of the emphasis by organisations has been on the physical wellbeing of their employees through programmes such as gym memberships, subsidised bicycle programmes...

Stress in the workplace is becoming a major issue for organisations and according to the latest statistics, there were 488,000 cases of work related stress, depression or anxiety last year, which equates to roughly 1.5 workers out of every 100 in the UK. Whilst this may seem low, it actually means a loss of 11.7 million days across all businesses (or roughly ten per cent of each affected worker’s time). Not surprisingly, public service occupations such as health workers and teachers show the highest levels of stress with reasons such as workload pressures, including deadlines, too much responsibility and lack of management support, cited as being the main factors. These are merely the official statistics for those who actually time off and do not include the millions of workers who still come into work but who may be demotivated by their job or where they work because of factors such as low pay, few opportunities for promotion and a lack of challenging work. But it is...