Work-Related Stress and Psychosocial Risk: What Safety Leaders Need to Know

Oct 16, 2026

Crew member looking stressed as he performs an operation wearing full personal protective eequipment and coveralls

A drilling supervisor is in week three of a four-week hitch. The well is behind schedule. Two crew members have gone onshore sick and nobody has replaced them. The permit queue for the next shift is twice what the team can safely work through, and the night supervisor wants a different job sequence from the one the client representative asked for an hour ago.

Nobody on the rig would call him unwell. He would call himself busy. Yet every condition around him is producing the state that erodes judgement in high-consequence work.

That state is work-related stress. In most organisations it still sits with HR.

It belongs on the risk register. Work-related stress has identifiable sources in how work is designed, resourced and led. Those sources can be assessed, controlled and monitored like any other hazard. Regulators in Great Britain and Australia now treat it that way, and ISO 45003 gives it a management system structure. The open question is whether safety systems have caught up.

Pressure and Stress Are Not the Same Thing

The UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) defines stress as the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressure or other demands placed on them. The important word is excessive. Pressure comes with every operational role, and in the right amount it sharpens performance. Stress starts when demands outrun the resources available to meet them, and the gap stays open long enough to do harm.

That makes stress a gap rather than a character flaw. It lives in the margin between demands and resources. Narrow the margin from either side and stress falls. Leave it open and individual resilience will not hold for long.

This is where work-related stress connects to psychosocial risk. ISO 45003 groups psychosocial hazards into three areas: how work is organised, the social factors at work, and the work environment, equipment and hazardous tasks. Those hazards are the cause. Stress is the most common route the harm takes. Ill health, errors and incidents are where it ends up.

For how this differs from team climate, see Psychological Safety vs Psychosocial Risk: Two Different Things.

Two crew members looking intently at their monitoring screen to ensure they are following correct procedure

What the Data Shows

The scale is no longer in dispute.

In Great Britain, HSE's statistics for 2024/25 put the number of workers with work-related stress, depression or anxiety at 964,000, with 409,000 of those new cases. That is more than half of all work-related ill health. It cost 22.1 million working days, around 62% of all days lost to work-related ill health, at an average of almost 23 days per case. HSE has also confirmed it is investigating organisations where several employees report work-related ill health, which points to a shift toward enforcement.

Australia shows the same pattern from the compensation side. Safe Work Australia's latest national figures record 17,900 serious claims for mental health conditions. That is 12.2% of all serious claims and up 169% since 2014-15. A typical claim involves around 35 weeks off work and almost $69,000 in compensation, roughly five times the time lost and four times the cost of other serious claims. Under the model WHS laws, psychosocial hazards carry the same weight as physical ones.

Globally, the WHO and ILO estimate that depression and anxiety cost 12 billion working days a year and close to US$1 trillion in lost productivity.

These figures come from claims and self-report surveys, so they capture the end of the process. A claim is what happens after stress has already become illness. Most of the operational cost arrives earlier: slower decisions, narrower attention, quieter crews. Very little of that ever reaches a claims system.

Why Stress Is a Safety Issue

The research linking stress to safety performance is consistent.

A meta-analysis by Nahrgang, Morgeson and Hofmann pooled 203 samples covering more than 186,000 workers. High job demands, including risks, hazards and complexity, were associated with burnout. Burnout was in turn associated with less safe working. Job resources such as autonomy, knowledge and a supportive environment pointed the other way, toward engagement and safer behaviour. A supportive work environment was the most consistent protective factor across every industry studied.

Offshore data tells the same story. In a study of more than 1,300 shift workers in the Norwegian petroleum industry, high quantitative demands, low support and shift work interfering with home life were each independently linked to mental distress. Work factors accounted for roughly three quarters of what the model explained. Individual characteristics accounted for far less.

The practical point for safety leaders: when a stressed worker makes an error, the error usually started in the work design. An incident analysis that stops at "the operator missed the alarm" has stopped one layer too early. The more useful question is what the system asked of that person, and what it gave them to meet it.

The research linking stress to safety performance is consistent.

HSE's Management Standards set out six areas of work design that drive stress when poorly managed: demands, control, support, relationships, role and change. They translate directly to rigs, vessels and mine sites, and they map onto the Six Drivers of workplace wellbeing.

HSE Area	What it looks like in operations	Six Drivers
Demands	Hitches extended to cover vacancies, permit queues beyond crew capacity, back-to-back night rotations	Work Design and Demands
Control	No say over pace, task sequence or roster	Work Design and Demands; Flexibility and Balance
Support	Supervisors stretched across too many crews, no reliable line to shore or home	Leadership and Relationships
Relationships	Bullying or harassment inside a closed camp or vessel, with nowhere to go after shift	Leadership and Relationships; Culture and Safety
Role	Conflicting instructions from operator, contractor and client	Work Design and Demands
Change	Restructures, contract handovers and crew changes communicated late or not at all	Leadership and Relationships; Culture and Safety

Two of the Six Drivers sit outside HSE's six areas: Recognition and Growth, and Purpose and Meaning. They matter in high-risk work because they shape how much demand a person can carry before pressure turns into stress. A crew that feels its effort goes unseen runs out of reserve sooner.

Crew members being transferred to support vessel via Billy Pugh feeling a lot of stress during this high-risk operation

Why the Usual Response Falls Short

Most organisations respond to stress with an employee assistance programme, a resilience workshop and perhaps an app. Each has a place. None of them changes the roster, the staffing level or the conflicting instructions.

HSE has made this point itself. Its guidance on stress notes that a whole industry has grown up around resilience and mindfulness, and that people who return to the same stressful environment are likely to become stressed again.

In hierarchy-of-control terms, individual support is the PPE layer. It protects people from what the system failed to eliminate. Nobody would accept PPE as the primary control for a physical hazard. Psychosocial hazards deserve the same standard.

What a System-Level Response Looks Like

Assess the conditions, not the people. Start with a structured assessment of psychosocial hazards across sites, rotations and roles. The output should be a hazard profile, not a list of struggling individuals. Then put psychosocial hazards on the risk register alongside physical ones, with owners and controls.

Fix design before delivering training. Rosters, staffing levels, role clarity and the way change gets communicated are the main levers. These are operational decisions, so operations leaders need to own them.

Build supervisor capability. The WHO's guidelines on mental health at work recommend manager training for the first time, specifically to prevent stressful working conditions and to respond to workers in distress. Frontline supervisors are where demands and resources meet.

Measure leading indicators. Claims and absence data arrive months late. Measure the conditions that produce stress, re-measure after changes, and report the results to the same forum that reviews safety performance.

Bring stress into incident analysis. When an event occurs, look at the demands, support and role clarity around the people involved. Each one points to a control the organisation can actually change.

This is the work Wellbeing Daily's diagnostics are built for. The Six Drivers Organisational Diagnostic scores each driver from 0 to 100 and shows where demands are outrunning resources. The Psychosocial Risk Assessment evaluates conditions clause by clause against ISO 45003 and produces a risk register and hazard-to-control matrix for audit, tender and board reporting.

The Core Argument

Work-related stress is a predictable response to conditions that organisations design, staff and lead. Those conditions can be measured. They can be changed.

None of this is quick. Roster redesign costs money, staffing gaps take time to close, and culture moves slowly. The alternative is to keep meeting stress at the end of the process, in the claims data and the incident reports, long after the conditions that caused it could have been fixed.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between work-related stress and psychosocial risk?

Psychosocial risk refers to hazards in how work is organised, the social environment at work and working conditions that can cause harm. Work-related stress is the most common harmful response to those hazards. Managing psychosocial risk means controlling the hazards so stress does not develop in the first place.

Do employers have a legal duty to manage work-related stress?

In many jurisdictions, yes. In Great Britain, employers must assess the risk of work-related stress as they would any other health and safety risk. Australia's model WHS laws treat psychosocial hazards the same way as physical hazards. ISO 45003 provides an international framework for managing them inside an occupational health and safety management system. Requirements vary, so check the rules where you operate.

What are the HSE Management Standards?

They are six areas of work design that HSE identifies as the main sources of work-related stress: demands, control, support, relationships, role and change. They give organisations a structured way to assess stress risk and act on it.

How do you measure work-related stress in a high-risk workforce?

Measure the conditions, not only the symptoms. A structured diagnostic covering demands, control, support, relationships, role clarity and change, broken down by site, rotation and role, shows where risk concentrates. Compensation claims and absence data are useful but lag by months.

Does resilience training reduce work-related stress?

It can help individuals cope, but it does not remove the source. If people return to the same conditions, stress returns. Resilience training works best as a supporting measure behind changes to work design.

Understand Where Your Organisation Stands

The Six Drivers Self-Assessment gives leaders a structured starting point for seeing where demands are outrunning resources, before it shows up in claims or incident data.

Take the Six Drivers Mini Self-Assessment