This informal CPD article ‘Why Workplace Wellbeing Strategies Are Failing: The Case for a Cultural Approach’, was provided by Ash Berzon, Founder of mindAbility, who work with public sector and corporate organisations to address the cultural and psychological roots of workplace stress, with a particular focus on psychological safety as the precondition for genuine resilience, rather than individual coping strategies alone.
According to recent data, work-related stress, depression and anxiety affected 964,000 workers in Great Britain in 2024/25, a 24% increase on the previous year and the highest figure since records began in 2001/02 (1). This resulted in 22.1 million lost working days. This is a puzzle worth sitting with. If organisations are spending more than ever on wellbeing, why does the problem keep growing?
Part of the answer lies in where that investment is directed. Most workplace wellbeing programmes focus on the individual. Mindfulness apps, resilience training, and one-off workshops all aim to equip employees with better coping strategies. These interventions are not without value. But a 2024 study (3) drawing on data from 46,336 workers, found that individual-level interventions show no meaningful engagement with the working conditions that create stress in the first place. In other words, teaching someone to breathe through a panic attack does nothing to address why their workload is causing one.
Wellbeing Structural Gap
This points to a structural gap in how organisations think about wellbeing. Resilience is frequently treated as the starting point, something employees are expected to build or demonstrate before their workplace takes any responsibility for the conditions producing the strain. Research suggests this gets the sequence backwards. Psychological safety, the confidence that a person can raise a concern, admit a mistake, or ask for help without fear of judgement or repercussion, should look to come first. Resilience without psychological safety is not sustainable coping. It is quiet endurance, and it is often mistaken for strength until it collapses into burnout.
Public Sector Examples
Public sector environments often illustrate this pattern with particular clarity. Workplaces built around high operational pressure, whether in policing, probation, or healthcare, often normalise chronic stress as simply part of the job. Phrases like "that's just how it is here" function as a kind of cultural anaesthetic. They discourage people from naming a problem, because naming it would mean admitting the environment itself needs to change, not just the individual within it.
Gender Patterns
The gendered pattern in the data reinforces the point. The figures for 2024/25 show 3,220 cases of work-related mental ill health per 100,000 female workers, compared with 2,580 per 100,000 for their male counterparts, a gap that opens from age 25 and holds through the years typically associated with juggling caring responsibilities alongside a career (1) (2). A generic resilience programme, designed around a default employee with no reference to these pressures, will miss what drives the disparity.
Coaching and support models built without accounting for the compounded load many women carry: professional, domestic, and often cultural are solving for the wrong variable. This is not an argument for separate provision as a tick-box gesture. It is an argument for support that starts from an accurate picture of who is under pressure and why, rather than a one-size response that quietly assumes the pressures are the same for everyone.
Final Thoughts
Addressing this requires a shift in where organisations look for solutions. Rather than asking how employees can be better equipped to withstand pressure, the more useful question is what in the culture may be generating that pressure in the first place, and whether it has simply become invisible through repetition. This might include how failure is discussed in team meetings, whether leaders model asking for help themselves, or how workloads are distributed when someone is already struggling.
None of this suggests that individual coping tools are worthless. But they cannot substitute for cultural change, and organisations that rely on them exclusively may be likely to see the same pattern the data reflects: rising absence, despite rising investment. The starting point for any wellbeing strategy that hopes to work, for any workforce, is an honest look at the working conditions employees are being asked to be resilient within, and an honest look at who is carrying the heaviest of those conditions.
We hope this article was helpful. For more information from mindAbility, please visit their CPD Member Directory page. Alternatively, you can go to the CPD Industry Hubs for more articles, courses and events relevant to your Continuing Professional Development requirements.
References
(1) Health and Safety Executive (2025) Health and Safety at Work: Summary Statistics for Great Britain 2025. Available at: hse.gov.uk/statistics
(2) CIPD (2025) Health and Wellbeing at Work Report. Available at: cipd.org
(3) Industrial Relations Journal (2024), study of 46,336 UK workers on individual-level wellbeing interventions.
