UK Government data showing shoplifting soaring by 37% in 2023 followed the British Retail Consortium’s report in February that showed a 50% rise in attacks on shop workers. These shock figures revealed the extent of the daily threats to frontline retail staff but they also serve as a reminder that UK employers and HR heads need to develop effective, longer-term strategies to safeguard hard-working employees’ wellbeing and avoid related problems such as employee burnout reckoned to affect at least one in five of UK workers.

This is because the surging violence across our retail sector is paralleled by mounting evidence from many different sectors that employees’ safety and wellness are under threat in today’s challenging workplaces.

According to the ONS, UK workforce sickness and injury absence rates are at a 20-year high while the latest Health & Safety Executive (HSE) estimates put the annual cost of workplace injury and work-related ill health at £20.7 billion for 2021/22, an 11% increase over 2019/20. The HSE also reckons that work-related stress, anxiety and depression accounts for 50% of all work-related ill-health in 2022/23.

After the UK government announced plans for a standalone offence of attacking a retail employee earlier this year, non-retail executives were quick to point out that this planned legislative measure could and should apply to their public-facing workers too.

With staff wellbeing and safety clearly a national-level challenge, there is an inability to fully appreciate the impacts of violence and abuse on our frontline workers, an insufficient understanding of the cumulative effects of stress on people’s wellbeing and the growing problem of burned-out employees, and a lack of support to individual employees and entire workforces.

The nature of burnout

Addressing employee burnout – where team members may exhibit extreme fatigue and feel increasing detachment from or cynicism towards their work – is a complex and multi-faceted undertaking. While many managers have tried to curb this problem with simple, short-term tactics like allowing troubled employees extra paid time off, a growing body of workplace research and clinical practice literature reviews attribute burnout problems to a complex mix of different work and personality factors, alongside unresolved workplace management issues.

Managers might quickly grasp that a direct report on the frontline might have concerns over their workload, sense of agency and their level of compensation. But would managers also be able to identify that limited or low-quality work relationships might also raise the employee’s anxiety levels? Or that a frontline employee is taking on customers’ or patients’ stress? In these circumstances, employers need more considered, sympathetic and evidence-based responses to endemic challenges like anxiety and burnout.

Standard responses can be harmful

In the case of rising violence toward frontline staff or traumatic incidents, while companies’ reaction is to organise timely responses to help their people, the evidence is mounting from across different industries that employers encounter problems when mobilising across-the-board, but ultimately unscientific, responses to attacks on their employees.

Organisations have in the past initiated a workforce or departmental-level response to traumatic events, involving counselling and psychological debriefings, for all employees affected. However, reviews of psychological briefings across different scenarios and recovery from road traffic accidents shows that this approach can do more harm than good because a majority of people recover from such experiences without psychological interventions – single counseling sessions can even reawaken trauma for those that had been successfully recovering.

The World Health Organization (WHO) stated in 2012 that “psychological debriefing should not be used for people exposed recently to a traumatic event as an intervention to reduce the risk of post-traumatic stress, anxiety or depressive symptoms.”

A practical alternative to debriefing can be achieved through Psychological First Aid (PFA) programmes which give workforces access to a range of different physical, emotional and social support services. Not only can these programmes address the different impacts affecting work colleagues but they can also be delivered in the workplace by specialist providers or trained managers and colleagues.

Holistic thinking

We believe that more effective wellbeing interventions by employers will come from employers gaining a better and earlier understanding of the many pressures – in the short and long-term – on their people. Organisations that develop this deeper understanding and implement data-led employee wellbeing programmes will be in a position, over time, to achieve a 1:1 employee care experience that can assess individual needs holistically, identify issues at an earlier stage, and guide their people on their own unique care pathways.

Sadly, many management teams still lack the insights into employees’ work conditions that would enable faster and effective support. These knowledge gaps often result from siloed management information – many safety reporting systems pre-dated HR, mental health and wellbeing records.

If companies can merge and analyse these different data sources, HR and line managers could gain a better understanding of the daily risks that workers face and the actions needed to report and mitigate them. In doing so, employers can avoid standard incident responses or unscientific quick fixes for staff anxiety or burnout problems.

A data-driven approach

Companies can put workforce safety and wellbeing on a more strategic footing by using data-informed employee wellbeing strategies that ensure managers at all levels gain more detailed information from employees about their workloads, anxieties and physical threats they face, paving the way for practical mitigation measures and longer-term workforce support.

Instead of relying on busy line managers to keep control of employees’ fears, organisations could instead investigate dedicated and expert post-incident support programmes for their people after troubling incidents. This intervention can simplify the task of providing different support for employees’ medical, mental health and safety concerns.

Deeper, real-time workforce-wide data will help managers react more quickly and decisively, otherwise employees’ reports of abuse and attacks will be unsubstantiated and managers’ ability to provide practical support to employees will remain limited.

The data from widespread uptake of safety apps alone can overturn companies’ received wisdom on wellbeing.

For example, a hospitality group jump-started employees’ participation in a new workforce safety programme with a simple ‘check on me’ safety application activated through each employee’s mobile device that generated 60,000 reports in just twelve months. The app-driven reporting service has transformed company managers’ grasp of the risks their employees faced, in and out of work.

Simplifying access to support can rapidly re-engage workforces with wellbeing. Take a leading recruitment firm  who implemented an early intervention platform to make it easier for its employees to access 24/7 integrated medical, mental health and personal safety support. While the company previously had separate digital medical support, an employee assistance programme and a wellbeing app, the perceived complexity of these three services had led to only modest uptake. Within eight weeks of going live with the new, unified service, the company has seen a six-fold uplift in employees activating it.

Revisiting wellbeing

Successfully designing and implementing more effective workforce wellbeing programmes inevitably brings its own challenges. It will require a reset of employers’ thinking, with many companies needing to reset their expectations of line managers and employees’ workloads and capabilities – too many companies have assumed for example that line managers can keep the lid on employees’ concerns over violence and abuse with a sympathetic ear and skilful use of additional leave. Organisations in all sectors will need to plan and develop more sympathetic workplace cultures to more rapidly support and actively engage employees.

Organisations that create a one-to-one approach to their employee care experience can assess individual employees’ needs holistically, identify issues at an earlier stage, and guide their people on their own unique care pathways. Such a unified approach is likely to increase staff engagement and loyalty – CIPD research in late 2022 found that fewer than six in ten (57%) employees had been told about the job benefits by their employer while in a study of HR Directors by savings platform Nous.co, almost a third (32%) thought that accessing certain employee benefits required too much effort from their employees.

Dedicated support

When faced by violence towards frontline teams, under-pressure organisations like retailers have built on evidence-based wellbeing strategies to introduce more sympathetic, clinical approaches to help employees, such as specialist training in challenging situations. This approach enables workers to anticipate challenging face-to-face situations and then adopt behaviours to defuse them, in-store or elsewhere at work.

And where an employer’s wellbeing programme has identified escalating problems such as store violence, support teams can be made available to reassure anxious employees and provide workers with tailored support plans; these can include targeted interventions such as additional training or sessions with a psychologist. Without a system for organising direct interventions, organisations can run the risk of losing valued and committed employees.

Towards better wellbeing

Ensuring effective employee wellbeing systems is vital in the wake of escalating threats to the UK’s workforce. While national reports are certainly sounding the alarm, the truly decisive wellbeing interventions for frontline employees will come from companies making a cultural shift to better understanding, better responses to and support of their valued team members under daily pressures, risk of burnout, and physical threats.