What if people left work more energised than when they arrived?
I have been turning this question over for some time, because I believe modern working life rests on an assumption that deserves a robust challenge: that work is inevitably stressful, inevitably exhausting, and something we must spend our evenings and weekends recovering from.
Suppose we questioned that assumption and, alongside helping people cope with workplace stress, began systematically removing the conditions that create it. That is the thinking behind my work and delivering exponential results for more than two decades. Now I’ve been bold enough to name it as Strategic Anti-Stress, and the case for it begins with the numbers.
The £51 Billion Problem
This is a huge number. I’m not even sure I can visualise what £51 billion looks like, but if it is spread across the UK’s 5.7 million private-sector businesses, it comes to almost £9,000 per business each year, or roughly £40 for every working day. They are amounts I can picture.
Deloitte estimates that poor employee mental health costs UK employers around £51 billion every year, while the Health and Safety Executive reports that work-related stress, depression and anxiety accounted for 22.1 million lost working days in 2024/25, close to two-thirds of all the working days lost to work-related ill health.
These figures illustrate the scale of the national burden and should be read as such, since the cost falls unevenly from one business to the next and Deloitte’s estimate covers poor mental health from every cause, with workplace stress as one significant contributor among several.
However, there is a further cost that sits outside any single set of company accounts. It’s one that is not being talked about or accounted for. Stress travels well beyond the company door, creating an invisible emotional and energetic supply chain.
The Invisible Supply Chain
I have been fascinated for a long time by what I call the Energy and Emotion Supply Chain. How we feel shapes how we think, behave, communicate and decide, and those feelings and behaviours shape the people around us, whose responses colour the next interaction, and the one after that. Follow the chain all the way down the line, and the impact is ultimately seen in profit.
Consider a stressed employee who makes an avoidable mistake that delays a client’s delivery. The client, understandably frustrated, asks their operations team to rearrange schedules, someone stays late to put things right, and one of that client’s own clients receives disappointing service as a result. Stress that began in one organisation has now travelled into another, consuming time, energy and money in a business that may have a perfectly healthy, supportive culture of its own.
Every business sits inside a web of other businesses, so every business imports and exports stress through the invisible web.
The national cost of this exported stress has yet to be measured, and its commercial consequences deserve far more serious attention than they currently receive.
Treating The Symptoms, or The Source?
Businesses invest in counselling, mindfulness, resilience training, employee assistance programmes and a host of other wellbeing initiatives, and many of these are enormously valuable.
For a moment, consider this scenario: imagine standing on a riverbank and pulling people out of the water one after another, helping them recover and then sending them straight back into the same dangerous current that swept them downstream. Sooner or later, someone has to walk upstream and find out why they keep falling in. That “someone” is me and the person who has been asking, “Why do we keep spending an ever-growing amount of money to soothe symptoms and manage something we don’t want, ie stressed people, yet the problem continues to grow.
When excessive workloads, unclear priorities, clunky systems, poor communication or leadership behaviour are generating chronic stress, resilience training asks people to withstand a problem that remains firmly in place. Strategic Anti-Stress addresses those organisational causes at source. Healthy pressure, stretch and ambition all stay, because they are part of what makes work rewarding, while the unnecessary stress that drains human and commercial performance is designed out.
My Source Solution approach looks beneath the visible symptoms to understand what is actually happening across the business, and in my experience resolving one underlying problem often improves several outcomes at once: employee wellbeing, operational efficiency, the client experience and profitability.
For owners, there is a sharper commercial point. Pervasive stress usually flows from the top, and when it does, it tends to signal an owner still carrying the day-to-day, with too few robust processes to hold the business steady in her absence. When the time comes to sell your business, buyers read that signal clearly, and a business that depends on its owner to function is harder to sell, more likely to attract an earn-out, and likely to command a lower price. By contrast, a well-designed business works hard for its owner, whereas one held together by its owner’s stress quietly lowers its own exit price. Here’s a question:
What If Britain Halved Workplace Stress In Five Years?
Now, if you catch yourself thinking, “that’ll never happen”, perhaps we can think again.
Imagine a national ambition to cut avoidable workplace stress by half over five years. Using Deloitte’s employer-cost estimate, an illustrative model suggests annual employer savings of between £7.65 billion and £17.85 billion by year five, depending on how much of today’s mental-health burden proves preventable through changes at work. These figures are scenarios, offered to show the size of the prize, and the prize itself is considerable: productive capacity released, less disruption, stronger organisations and more room for sustainable growth.
But consider something else the figures will never show:
Imagine people arriving home with more patience and energy for their families, leaders making clearer decisions, teams growing in confidence, creativity and purpose, and relationships between businesses, suppliers and clients becoming steadier with more gratitude and generosity. Improve enough workplaces, and we begin to lift something larger than performance, namely the mood of the nation itself, and I believe that possibility is well worth exploring.
Profit And Joy Belong Together
We do not have to choose between profit and joy.
It’s now fairly well known that dissatisfaction, anger, and discontentment are emotions experienced with stress, so what happens when we purposefully create joy in the work environment? To be clear, I’m talking here about the sense of joy and satisfaction derived from a job well done and not giddy giggling!
Creating businesses where everyone can thrive is, I believe, one of the greatest opportunities open to leaders today. Whichever way it is done and gets results is the perfect way. But going to the root and purposefully dismantling stress strategically offers a different way of thinking about how we design, lead and run our businesses, one that treats unnecessary stress as a strategic and commercial problem to be solved at source, with responsibility held by the organisation as a whole and the burden lifted from the shoulders of each individual.
Perhaps the next great opportunity for British business lies in building workplaces where calm, focused people do the work their business was designed to do, for clients to experience genuinely good service as a given, and where the healthy returns that follow leave everyone with more of themselves for the life waiting beyond the office. So I return to the question I began with. “What if people left work more energised than when they arrived?” Imagine what we could create together, whether that is focus on releasing profits in your business or an eye to the bigger picture.
If you would like to explore what Strategic Anti-Stress could look like in your business, let’s have a confidential conversation that costs nothing, but might change everything. No script and no sales pitch, simply an honest conversation about where the stress in your business begins and what removing it could release. Get in touch.
Love. Gail.