Stress Awareness Week – what should employers be doing?

Work-related stress does not present a new exposure for employers or their insurers. However, the causative issue creating claims is changing. Increasing workloads, changes within organisations, hybrid working, introduction of innovative technology, online abuse and greater awareness of individual vulnerability are creating an increasingly complicated employers’ liability landscape.

Health and Safety Executive awareness

The Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) Stress Awareness Week was launched on 31 October 2026, with HSE placing emphasis on employers to take practical action to prevent and manage workplace stress, just as they would with other workplace risks.

This is more than a wellbeing message. It reinforces the question in stress litigation: when does workplace pressure become a reasonably foreseeable risk of injury, and what evidence can an employer produce to show that reasonable steps were taken to address that risk?

Stress as a leading cause of work related ill health

HSE's position is clear – work related stress remains one of the leading causes of work-related ill health in Great Britain. The HSE’s Working Minds campaign encourages employers to implement and apply the "5Rs". This includes Reach Out, Recognise, Respond, Reflect and Make it Routine. The aim is for employers not to shy away from starting conversations with employees around mental wellbeing and stress. Once this step has been taken, employers should then be able to take positive action to address any concerns raised and support their staff.

HSE has also reinforced its Management Standards approach to address six key areas of work that can potentially have a causative effect on stress. These include demands, control, support, relationships, role, and change.

Stressful jobs

An employee may have a demanding job but that is insufficient to establish negligence. Workplace stress claims remain fact sensitive. However, if an employer is aware of repeated complaints, workload problems, difficult interactions, or an employee's particular vulnerability then alarm bells should ring. The employer’s response to such incidents, coupled with contemporaneous evidence documenting its response are fundamentally important.

Individual vulnerability

Menopause, neurodiversity, disability, and other health issues can all have an impact on workplace pressures. Employee requests for adjustments, recommendations from occupational-health, sickness records and conversations with management should all be treated as highly important. Employers must be alert, when considering workplace stress, that one system of work does not necessarily affect every employee in the same way.

Cumulative exposure: the emerging claims challenge

Changing workplace demands, mainly driven by technology and AI, future claims risk including a combination of excessive workload, organisational restructuring, technology changes, and repeated requests for assistance make a much more complex factual picture around foreseeability, breach, and causation. Whilst none of these factors individually may establish negligence, it is important to consider the whole picture. That, in turn, makes contemporaneous evidence crucially important.

What should insurers be looking for?

Stress Awareness Week provides an opportunity for insurers and insureds to examine stress through a claims-prevention lens as well as a wellbeing one.

For insurers, the fundamental legal tests governing stress claims remain familiar. However, closer attention should be paid to the changing factual landscape against which those tests are applied. As workplace risks become more complex and individualised, good stress management is increasingly also good claims defensibility.