Threat or opportunity: the rising cost of stress

A third major survey of 2011 counts stress as the leading cause of absence outside of colds, headaches and other common ailments.

Earlier in the year the Department of Work and Pensions found that ‘Depression, bad nerves or anxiety’ were the most commonly reported symptoms of employees in the UK.

This was followed up by a Confederation of British Industry survey which found that 46% of short term and 61% of long term absences were caused by mental ill health.

Now the annual absence survey of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has found that, across all the types and sizes of organisations it surveyed, stress accounted for 57% of short term and 68% of long term absence.

The CIPD measures absence as total days lost through illness. The other way to do it is through incidences of illness.

Research for the Centre for Mental Health has shown that someone with stress is likely to be off work for twice as long as someone without stress. An incidence of stress is more damaging to a company than any other illness.

For example, the latest data from the Health and Safety Executive shows that almost twice as many employees report back pain to their GPs than mental ill health (53% against 37%), while almost twice as many absences are caused by mental ill health than back pain (55% against 31%).

The way of measuring absence by days lost gives the impression that over half the UK workforce has symptoms of stress, a figure which seems so high that it almost questions its validity as an illness. In fact, though, one could almost halve this figure into the number of actual cases of stress, about one in four of the workforce.

Measuring the incidence of stress helps make the problem manageable.  At a really basic level, preventing one case of stress is the equivalent in days lost of two cases of back pain. Dealing with stress is a cost efficient way of bringing down absence levels.

This is more so because stress management is not inherently expensive. According to the CIPD the two top causes are workload (48%) and management style (40%), neither of which require large outlays to fix.

The HSE’s Management Standards are designed specifically to help organisations risk assess for stress, yet the CIPD survey found that only 30% of organisations used them to identify and reduce stress at work, a similar figure to the CBI survey.

The current round of reports should make organisations more alert to the problem of stress at work and the opportunity to save money at relatively little cost.