The pace of change in the workplace is accelerating, with organisations adapting to become more agile than ever in response to rapid developments in AI and a turbulent global economy.
While CTOs have more tools than ever available to measure how their technology is performing, the industry standard for assessing how a company’s people are coping under this kind of pressure has barely changed in decades.
The annual employee survey, a single data point that gives a yearly snapshot of workforce health, tells managers very little about the state of an employee’s wellbeing — and whether it’s improving or declining.
“One data point a year tells you almost nothing about direction. Two people can score the same when one of them is recovering and the other is declining, and they need very different things from you,” says Ed Shee, CTO at WONE, a preventative platform for workplace stress.
The risk to businesses and their people is real. If managers lack the information they need to know if a team member is under stress, they’re unable to respond with the appropriate safeguards that will keep their team, and the business, healthy.
The results — burnout, high rates of absenteeism and poor staff retention — are avoidable, if businesses adopt better ways to measure how their people are performing.
Modern software and hardware is unlocking new ways for managers to look after their people, turning stress from a once-a-year guess into something that can be measured continuously and acted on early.
The era of Stress Intelligence
London-based WONE offers an alternative to the annual workplace survey by combining three main data points to give employees and managers a more continuous assessment of workplace stress levels.
These include a monthly, scientifically validated psychometric assessment; data from wearables to track stress-related physiological markers; and conversations with WONE's AI performance coach Ori, which helps employees interpret their own data and coping strategies.
The moment employees believe their employer can see their data, they stop answering honestly.
Chief Scientific Officer Lydia Roos describes how WONE combines this data to teach something called “Stress Intelligence.”.
“At its core, stress intelligence is an individual capability, in the same way that emotional intelligence is,” she tells Sifted.”
“It's the ability to detect stress signals early, interpret what they mean across your psychological, behavioural, and physiological systems, and respond in ways that support recovery and sustained functioning. We built the framework on decades of stress and coping research, and it's a trainable skill.”
Roos points out that while Stress Intelligence is enacted at the individual level, organisations can create the conditions that make practicing this form of pressure management possible.
“Organisations that promote stress intelligence get the impact that chronic stress has on cognitive performance and decision-making,” she says.
“They treat rest and recovery as necessary for sustained output and performance at work, because that's what the science says. They pay attention to the balance between pushing people enough that they learn and grow and overworking them past the point where they don’t have the brain space to grow, and end up leaving instead.”
Giving managers visibility
Most annual surveys are anonymised and aggregated on a company-wide level, meaning a serious issue in one team might not be visible in the data.
“What that means in practice is that nobody can act on the result. The manager can't, and the person who filled it in can't either, because they never see their own answers come back,” says Roos. “What the company ends up with is an average which washes out differences between teams that are doing well, and ones that are in serious trouble.”
On top of helping individuals to understand their own capacity to manage stress, WONE can give managers visibility when there’s a problem in a particular team, so that they can intervene to try and resolve structural problems.
“When a whole group's scores are dropping in the same domains at the same time, that's a signal that something structural needs to change, whether it's workload, resourcing, or management,” says Roos, adding that WONE helps managers proactively prevent problems like burnout, rather than waiting for them to arise.
It's the ability to detect stress signals early and interpret what they mean across your psychological, behavioural, and physiological systems.
“In a reactive model, none of that is visible until people start leaving or calling in sick, and by then you're paying for the problem instead of preventing it.”
WONE’s data also underscores the fact that team leaders need to foster their own Stress Intelligence: managers are often an unsupported cohort when it comes to stress management and those with weaker resilience resources were around three times more likely to report burnout.
Changing the equation around workplace wellbeing
Data by WONE shows the business case for building work-related stress resilience isn't abstract.
In a study of 1,000 employees across the US and UK, WONE found that highly stressed workers take eight times as many sick days as their less stressed colleagues, are nearly four times more likely to be considering leaving, and file two and a half times as many health claims.
“Reducing chronic stress reduces the conditions that generate claims in the first place, which is why the healthcare savings show up consistently when companies take a preventive approach,” says Roos.
Shee explains how he’s seen managers make the economic case for improving stress resilience to their higher-ups by reframing the language around preventative workplace health Stress Intelligence.
“Treated as capacity planning, it shows up in metrics already on the dashboard: change failure rate, incident resolution time, how much institutional knowledge sits with one exhausted person who hasn't taken leave,” he says.
Left unaddressed, these metrics can often drive up the cost of unplanned sick leave, whether long or short term, as well as the associated costs that may come with agency staff.
“None of that requires an executive to care about wellbeing as a value, it requires them to accept that human capacity is a real constraint on delivery. “
One data point a year tells you almost nothing about direction. Two people can score the same when one of them is recovering and the other is declining, and they need very different things from you.
Roos adds that WONE’s model only works when employees trust that their individual data stays private from the company and from their manager. The platform only distributes aggregated data across a cohort. There is a minimum amount of employees that must answer the self report assessment to provide a meaningful measurement of a workforce's resilience profile.
“The moment employees believe their employer can see their data, they stop answering honestly,” she says. “Once that happens, the measurement becomes worthless.”
It's a simple equation, in the end. The more honestly people can report how they're really doing, the more quickly and accurately a business can act on it.
That response can be the difference between a company and its people simply keeping up and both performing at the highest levels.
Discover how WONE uses continuous stress intelligence and coaching to build a healthier, more resilient workforce. Book a demo here.
