National Stress Awareness Day is a useful annual prompt to look at how our workplaces affect wellbeing. But it also invites an uncomfortable question: are we asking employees to be more resilient when we should be asking whether the workplace itself is healthy?
Beyond individual resilience
Organisations cannot rely on employee resilience alone. Top-down, assumptive and ill-thought-through interventions can do more harm than good — for example, resilience training that implies stress is the individual’s problem to solve, while leaving the causes untouched. Managers have a central responsibility to create an environment in which people can thrive.
Pressure versus distress
Not all stress is bad. A degree of pressure can be motivating and even enjoyable — the kind of positive challenge that helps people perform and grow. Problems arise when pressure tips into distress: negative, unresolved stress that, left unchecked, can lead to anxiety, withdrawal and depression. Stress tends to become harmful when it is experienced as uncontrollable, intolerable and prolonged.
People respond differently
Crucially, people respond to pressure in very different ways. What energises one person may overwhelm another. This is why a “one size fits all” approach so often fails, and why interventions need to account for individual differences and circumstances.
What managers and organisations can do
The most effective responses focus on two things: addressing how pressure is perceived and supporting people’s sense of self-efficacy — their confidence that they can cope and influence their situation — and building positive workplace cultures in which people feel supported. To help with this, COPE uses a validated questionnaire tool that identifies the root causes of workplace pressure, so that prevention can be targeted where it will make the most difference rather than applied indiscriminately.
