Sometimes the answer is obvious it’s just not the answer people want to hear. This is the case with employees mental health and wellbeing. Organisations will try almost anything no matter how wacky, unproven or expensive in an attempt to find new ways for employees to cope better with stress. The answer is to reduce stress not find new ways of coping with it. The trouble is that the most common causes of stress in the workplace are the most ingrained and hardest to change.

The Top Ten most common workplace sources of stress include shift work, long working hours, job insecurity, conflict between work and life ,low job controls ,high work demands and lack of support. These tend to be structural aspects of work so the answers to reducing stress include improving pay, providing secure contracts, giving employees some flexibility and control over their work schedule, providing opportunities for training and development plus mentoring. Not yoga or mindfulness sessions , wild swimming or gong bathing , apps to record your daily steps or count calories.

An NHS study into improving wellbeing in health care workplaces found the most effective methods included getting rid of pointless bureaucratic procedures, reducing the length of meetings, improving staff rotas, and making people feel that work was a psychologically safe place. I am sure these examples would strike a cord with lots of employee not just those in healthcare setting. But these are the aspects of work organisations find most difficult to change.

Bureaucratic procedures once in place are hard to streamline let alone do away with even if those expected to follow them don’t see the point. Staff rotas are  drawn up to meet the needs of the service/organisation not the employee. Who does not feel they spend too much time in meetings, but those who chair them think they are important, an essential tool of management even if they are not always well chaired. Our workplaces seem characterised but misogyny, homophobia and  racism or they are places where people are extremely weary about how they express their views for fear of being called sexist, racist or homophobic. Either way work does not feel a safe place.

And yet there is one simple way of addressing all these issues. One of the most effective if not the most effective way of reducing employee stress is to improve the quality of management. Unfortunately number one in the top ten most common causes of workplace stress is poor management!

But don’t take my word for it just ask HR.