Drewberry™ uses cookies to offer you the best experience online. By continuing to use our website you agree to the use of cookies including for ad personalization.
If you would like to know more about cookies and how to manage them please view our privacy & cookie policy.
We polled 1,000 employees in our 2023 Employee Benefits & Workplace Satisfaction survey with YouGov and found that nearly half of UK employees felt stressed.
This is a worrying statistic. But it comes as no surprise considering the current economic climate. The cost of living crisis is causing financial stress and mental health issues among employees.
Although stress levels have reduced since our 2021 survey (from 58%), nearly half (45%) of respondents told us that they were feeling stressed. This is still a significant amount.
When asked why they felt stressed, 53% of respondents cited work to be the main cause. This has reduced by 14.5% from our last survey, which is positive news. The other main causes for stress cited were:
It’s good to see that from our previous survey levels of stress appear to be reducing. However what is causing employees has changed slightly. Mental health is causing less stress than previous years, whereas family responsibilities has seen an increase.
With money being cited as one of the main causes of stress, we asked whether or not employees thought their work performance had been affected by the cost of living crisis and 1 in 5 said yes.
Not only this 47% said that their mental health had also been impacted too. Stress can have a knock on affect when it comes to work performance, so it’s important that as an employer you look at ways of tackling it head on.
This can be done by offering benefits that employees can use to help manage different causes of stress.
When asked what benefits employees found the most attractive, insurance policies that protected themselves and their loved ones (19%) topped the list. This was followed by:
If left alone stress can lead to poor mental and physical health. This can in turn lead to poor performance at work or even long term sickness.
By understanding what causes employees stress as well as the benefits that they would like to receive, you can start to build out an effective benefits strategy that can help to tackle its causes. As a part of this strategy you could include benefits such as:
Other benefits that can help eliminate stress include group risk products such as Death In Service, Group Health Insurance, Company Income Protection and Group Critical Illness Cover. These benefits can help provide financial security to employees and their loved ones.
Group risk policies often come with free extra benefits, such as virtual GP services, counselling, meditation sessions, and employee assistance programmes (EAP).
These services can help your employees and their loved ones with managing their stress levels.
Nick Nelms
Senior Consultant, Employee Benefits
