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Health and Safety Executive · 6 days ago

HSE urges employers to take action on work-related stress during Stress Awareness Week

Reported by Health and Safety Executive, and covered by Health & Safety Matters. The analysis below is ours.

Stress Awareness Week, 2 to 6 November 2026

A person in a dark jacket at a desk, one hand raised to their face beside a laptop
Photo: Elisa Ventur on Unsplash

964,000

workers in Great Britain with work-related stress, depression or anxiety

HSE's annual estimate from the Labour Force Survey, 2024/25, self-reported: 52% of all work-related ill health and 22.1 million working days lost, an average of 22.9 days per case

The regulator's message is not about wellbeing perks. It is that stress is a health and safety risk, and an employer assesses it the way it assesses any other: find the causes, ask the people affected, act. HSE still says many employers do not realise they must - and its six areas, from demands to change, are all things a manager shapes.

What MeaningFuel does about it

Before it happensWhat the daily ritual works on, every working day
Well-Being and Resilience every working morning, for everybody on the same two-minute question. HSE's first step is to reach out and start the conversation about pressure; a daily habit means that conversation has already happened in small pieces before anybody has to open it formally.
After it hasThe module prescribed to the team that has this
Book Energy That Lasts for the team where the load has outrun the people: ten short daily lessons over two working weeks, one of them aimed at the load itself rather than the person carrying it, with two ten-minute debriefs its lead runs from a written guide. Each person chooses whether to take part, and the lead never sees what anybody writes.
What management seesThe reading that makes either one provable
Engagement by team and by theme, so the team where fewer people answer each week shows before absence does. What anybody chose waits until enough have answered to hide each choice, and no screen shows an individual's. It is a reading of engagement, not a diagnosis: the judgement about causes and actions stays the employer's.

The offsite worked. That was never the problem.

Week six is the problem. The person who ran it has moved teams, the thing everyone agreed has quietly stopped happening, and nobody can name the day it stopped.

MeaningFuel keeps it going: one short insight each working day on the values you chose, and a two-week micro-training for any team that falls behind. You see which teams carry them, pooled, with nobody named.

Start 14 days freeNot convinced? Read the long version

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