Managing the Risk That Costs Devon Businesses the Most Working Days

Most resilience conversations start with cash, supply chains or cyber. Yet the largest single drain on working time in British businesses is not a storm, a supplier failure or a ransomware attack. It is work-related stress.

In 2024/25, an estimated 964,000 workers in Great Britain suffered from work-related stress, depression or anxiety, and 22.1 million working days were lost as a result, 52% of all work-related ill health and 62% of all working days lost to it. The average case costs 22.9 working days. In a 20-person business, one case can remove the equivalent of a month of someone’s productive year.

For smaller Devon employers, that is a resilience issue with a hard commercial edge: delayed projects, lost tender capacity, overtime costs, recruitment costs, and a knock-on load on the people who stay.

It is a legal duty, not a wellbeing nice-to-have

Employers are required to assess the risk of work-related stress in the same way they assess any other significant workplace risk, and to act on what they find. The HSE’s Management Standards give a practical framework: prepare the organisation, identify the risk factors, decide who can be harmed and how, evaluate the risks, record the findings, then monitor and review.

The distinction matters. Yoga sessions, an app subscription and a wellbeing noticeboard are not a risk assessment. They treat symptoms and leave the causes untouched, and they provide no defence if an employee brings a claim or the HSE asks what you assessed and what you changed.

Where the pressure actually comes from

HSE data points consistently to organisational causes rather than individual fragility: workload pressure and tight deadlines, lack of managerial support, organisational change, role uncertainty, interpersonal relationships, and violence or bullying at work.

Read that list again from a business resilience perspective. Every item is a management systems problem. Every item is fixable without a large budget. And every item gets worse during exactly the periods when a business most needs its people performing, restructures, growth, a lost contract, a key person leaving.

Five practical steps for a smaller employer

1. Measure before you spend. Pull the data you already hold: absence days and reasons, turnover by team, overtime patterns, grievances, exit interview themes. Clusters usually point to a team or a manager, not to the whole company.
2. Ask the workforce properly. A short anonymous survey based on the six Management Standards areas, demands, control, support, relationships, role and change, gives you comparable data you can re-run in twelve months. Team discussions then explain the scores.
3. Write it down as a risk assessment. Named hazards, who is affected, existing controls, what more is needed, owner, date. If it does not look like your other risk assessments, it is not one.
4. Fix the causes you control. Realistic deadlines and resourcing, clear job roles, a defined escalation route, trained line managers who can hold a supportive conversation early, and proper communication during change. Line-manager capability is usually the highest return intervention.
5. Review it like any other control. Re-measure annually, and always after a restructure, a major contract change or a significant absence pattern.

The resilience return

A business that understands why its people are under pressure can plan around it. It keeps experienced staff, protects delivery during disruption, avoids the cost of avoidable recruitment, and can demonstrate to clients, insurers and tender panels that its workforce risk is actively managed.

That is what workforce resilience looks like in practice: not a wellbeing initiative, but a measured, documented, reviewed control on the risk that costs British employers more working days than any other.

About WT Consultancy

WT Consultancy (SW) Ltd provides practical health and safety support to businesses across Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset, including stress risk assessments, workforce risk reviews and retained competent-person support. If you would like an honest view of where your workforce risk sits, we are happy to have that conversation.