Workplace Wellbeing: How to Build a Safer, Healthier Workforce

Workplace wellbeing has become a priority for many organisations, but the numbers suggest that wellbeing initiatives alone cannot solve the problem.

In Great Britain, 964,000 workers reported work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25. Work-related illness and injury together accounted for an estimated 40.1 million lost working days over the same period ⁽¹⁾.

Workplace wellbeing covers the physical, mental, emotional and social health of employees in relation to their work and working environment.

Access to support are of course crucial, but so do the conditions people experience every day. Workload, fatigue, pressure, communication, leadership and working conditions can all affect how people feel and perform.

They can also affect safety. For HSE and operational leaders, this creates an important link between wellbeing in the workplace, human factors and safety.

What workplace wellbeing actually means

Gym memberships, wellbeing days and mental health awareness campaigns can all have some value. But workplace wellbeing goes much further.

A more complete approach considers several connected areas:

• Physical wellbeing: safe working conditions, ergonomics, fatigue management and injury prevention.
• Mental and emotional wellbeing: manageable pressure, psychological safety, support and resilience.
• Social wellbeing: trust, communication, inclusion and positive working relationships.
• Financial wellbeing: fair pay, benefits and access to appropriate financial support.
• Behavioural wellbeing: how fatigue, pressure and frustration influence attention, decisions and behaviour.

The last point is particularly relevant to health and safety. A person's physical and mental state does not stay separate from the task they are performing.

Physical, mental and behavioural health: a joined-up view

Consider someone reaching the end of a demanding shift. They may have the right training, PPE, procedures and equipment, but they may also be tired, under pressure to finish or frustrated by an earlier problem. Those conditions can affect attention and decision-making.

This does not mean fatigue or frustration automatically causes an incident. Nor should workers be expected to compensate for poor planning, excessive workloads or inadequate resources.Organisations should reduce unnecessary sources of pressure where possible. At the same time, people can benefit from recognising when their state is beginning to affect how they work.

Why workplace wellbeing and safety culture are connected

The link becomes clearer when we look at everyday work.

Fatigue can make sustained attention harder. Pressure can lead to rushing, while frustration can affect judgement and communication. And when someone has completed a task successfully hundreds of times, familiarity can make it easier to overlook a hazard that was obvious when the task was new.

SafeStart focuses on four states that can affect safety: rushing, frustration, fatigue and complacency.

These states can increase the likelihood of critical errors such as taking your eyes or mind off task, moving into the line of fire, or losing balance, traction or grip.

Human factors training does not replace conventional risk controls. Engineering, procedures, supervision, training and safe systems of work remain essential. It adds another layer by considering what happens when people interact with those systems under real working conditions.

The business case for workplace wellbeing

Poor workplace wellbeing can affect absence, retention, engagement, productivity and safety performance.

HSE reported that 1.9 million workers suffered from work-related ill health in Great Britain during 2024/25. Injuries and ill health linked to current working conditions were estimated to have cost £22.9 billion in 2023/24 ⁽²⁾.

The hidden cost of stress and mental health at work

HSE identifies six areas of work design associated with work-related stress: demands, control, support, relationships, role and change. (Source: HSE, Management Standards)

This is an important distinction because the solution cannot always be to help individuals cope better. Organisations also need to look at what is creating the pressure. If workloads are consistently excessive, for example, resilience training will not remove the problem. In the same way, human factors training cannot compensate for an unguarded machine. Effective workplace wellbeing therefore starts with identifying and managing the conditions that are creating unnecessary strain.

From risk reduction to performance: the measurable upside

Wellbeing should be measured as part of the wider working environment, rather than simply by counting how many people participate in wellbeing activities.

Useful indicators can include:

• absence trends
• employee feedback
• staff turnover
• stress risk assessment findings
• near-miss reporting
• incident trends
• safety conversations
• manager confidence

No single measure tells the whole story. Looking at several indicators together provides a much better picture of what is happening across the organisation.

Why workplace wellbeing initiatives often fall short

A wellbeing initiative can be useful without addressing the underlying problem.

A wellbeing week, for example, may raise awareness. But if employees return to the same excessive workloads afterwards, very little has changed. The same applies to other forms of support. An employee assistance programme can provide valuable help, but it does not remove organisational stressors. Training managers to recognise signs of stress is useful, but managers also need the authority and resources to address the problems they identify.

For workplace wellbeing initiatives to have a lasting effect, they need to connect with the way work is actually organised and managed.

When wellbeing becomes a box-ticking exercise

UK employers have a legal duty to assess the risk of work-related stress and act on it, just as they would with other health and safety risks.

Policies and risk assessments provide an important foundation. What matters next is what happens in practice. Can employees raise concerns without worrying about the response? Do managers act when those concerns are raised? Are workloads realistic? Is fatigue considered when shifts and tasks are planned? These questions tell us much more about wellbeing culture than the number of initiatives listed in a policy.

Human factors: connecting wellbeing and everyday risk

Human factors can help explain what happens when workplace conditions begin to affect behaviour.

Take rushing. An employee may be moving too quickly or skipping a step, but the pressure to rush may have started much earlier. Perhaps production is behind schedule. A maintenance problem may have delayed the job. The team may be short-staffed, or an unexpected problem may have created additional work.

Where possible, organisations should address those conditions. However, not every source of pressure can be eliminated. Equipment fails. Plans change. Unexpected problems happen.

This is where personal risk awareness becomes useful. Someone who recognises that they are rushing, frustrated or fatigued has a better opportunity to adjust before that state contributes to an error. With practice, recognising these patterns can become part of how people manage risk during the job, rather than something discussed only after an incident.

What an effective workplace wellbeing strategy looks like

There is no single workplace wellbeing program that works everywhere. A warehouse running around the clock faces different challenges from an office, construction project or utility operation.

However, effective strategies generally work at two levels.

First, organisations need to address the conditions they can influence. That includes workload, work design, leadership, ergonomics, employee voice and known sources of work-related stress.

Second, people need practical skills for dealing with situations that cannot always be designed out. This includes recognising changes in their state, communicating concerns, supporting colleagues and adjusting when circumstances become difficult.

Building habits that carry beyond the workplace

Awareness is useful, but awareness alone fades. The longer-term goal is to build habits.

Recognising that fatigue is affecting concentration, checking the line of fire before moving, or noticing that frustration is influencing a decision can become prompts to reassess what happens next.

SafeStart develops this type of awareness by helping people recognise the connection between their state, the errors they are more likely to make and the risk around them. Because these skills are based on everyday behaviour rather than a particular machine or procedure, they can also apply outside work, including while driving or completing routine tasks at home.

Integrating wellbeing into your existing health and safety framework

Wellbeing does not need to become another separate HSE system. It can be considered through processes that already exist, including:

• risk assessments
• stress risk assessments
• incident investigations
• near-miss reporting
• toolbox talks
• safety observations
• leadership conversations

Incident investigations are a good example: Instead of stopping at the action immediately before an incident, investigators can look at the conditions surrounding it. Was the person under unusual time pressure? Was fatigue involved? Had a process change caused confusion or frustration? Was there something about the way the work was organised that made the error more likely?

That gives the organisation much more to learn from than simply recording "operator error" and retraining the employee.

How SafeStart supports workplace wellbeing through human factors training

SafeStart is not a mental health programme. Its role within workplace wellbeing is more specific: helping people recognise how states such as rushing, frustration, fatigue and complacency can affect attention and increase the likelihood of critical errors.

Through practical techniques and habit-building, employees learn to recognise these patterns and respond before they contribute to an incident. This strengthens personal risk awareness while giving teams a shared language for discussing human factors.

Because these states occur across different working environments, the approach is relevant whether someone is troubleshooting equipment, driving, working around machinery or dealing with competing priorities.

Practical steps to improve workplace wellbeing

Improving workplace wellbeing does not necessarily require another standalone programme. A useful starting point is to look at the conditions, behaviours and existing data already available across the organisation.

1. Assess current wellbeing risks. Review absence, stress risk assessments, employee feedback, incidents, near misses and concerns around workload or fatigue. Look for patterns across these sources rather than considering them separately.

2. Address organisational causes. Where workload, staffing, work design or management practices create avoidable strain, identify what can be removed or improved.

3. Connect wellbeing with safety. Consider where fatigue, pressure, frustration and other human factors affect both employee wellbeing and exposure to risk.

4. Build practical skills. Help employees recognise when their state is affecting attention or decisions and give managers the tools to respond when concerns are raised.

5. Measure and adapt. Track relevant indicators over time to understand whether working conditions and behaviours are changing.

Leadership is important throughout this process. Managers need the time and authority to address concerns, while employees need to feel comfortable speaking about workload, fatigue, pressure and mistakes. That openness gives organisations better information to manage both wellbeing and safety risks.

Building wellbeing into everyday work

Workplace wellbeing needs to be considered in how work is designed, managed and performed, rather than treated as a collection of occasional initiatives.

This means addressing unnecessary sources of pressure where possible, while also preparing people for the pressures that cannot always be removed. Human factors training supports this second part by helping people recognise when their state is affecting attention, decisions and exposure to risk.

Explore SafeStart's human factors safety training programmes to learn how practical human factors skills can help reduce unintentional errors and support a stronger safety culture.