The way we work is not conducive to productivity.
Looking back on my experiences working in heavily pressurised corporate environments, I can’t help but notice that the way we work is not conducive to productivity alongside sustainable mental wellbeing. However, you cannot have one without the other.
There are many reasons for this, but here’s 3 main reasons I’ll be focusing on today.
The way we work is outdated.
Too many employers are teaching the “why” of mental wellbeing but not the “how”.
Creating psychological safety is a much bigger task than people are realising.
The way we work is outdated.
When I think of a corporate environment, I think of desks, lots of wires and computers, and people working tirelessly to meet deadlines and the endless needs of others. This is now the case at home as well as in office spaces.
Advice suggests that for every one hour spent at a screen, employees should be taking a 5 minute break. Employers have a legal requirement to educate their staff about this and many do via e-learning. However, a study conducted by the Independent in April 2023 suggested than the average worker only takes 2 breaks a day totalling 24 minutes. The same study also reported employee guilt for taking breaks as well as increased workloads.
Working expectations have changed since COVID-19. The need to work from home opened employees eyes to ways of working with more freedom and flexibility, but this only exacerbated issues with taking breaks. A survey conducted by the CIPD in 2024 showed that 41% of remote workers reported feeling guilty about taking breaks, as they feared that stepping away from work would be perceived as unproductive or lazy.
So the next question, is this sustainable?
The fact is that remaining behind a screen for long periods and absorbing energy from various directions (emails, clients, teams chats, social media, texts, calls) makes it almost impossible to remain consistently productive.
If employees are not creating mental space or taking REAL time to regularly lower cortisol levels then burn out is inevitable.
Beyond the e-learning and stress management courses, perhaps it’s the way we are working. Remaining tirelessly stuck behind a screen meeting endless work demands is not conducive to productivity. The human body was not designed to sustain working this way.
Therefore, the change isn’t just in the legal obligations, or even the education. It’s the action of creating real impactful change in the way we work.
Too many employers are teaching the “why” of mental wellbeing but not the “how”.
Is requiring your staff to complete another e-learning or attend training really helping them to create real impactful change in their wellbeing habits?
In 2023, the CIPD reported that while 72% of employees indicated that stress management training was useful, only 47% felt equipped to apply the techniques. Many employees found training too theoretical and not practical.
I recall many occasions walking to meeting rooms with colleagues or waiting on Teams for training to start only to hear colleagues comment how frustrated they felt about having to attend at all. Time spent in training is time lost meeting work demands. In the meantime, the Burnout Report 2025 by Mental Health UK reports that a staggering 9 in 10 adults report “experiencing high or extreme levels of pressure or stress”. What’s worse is that “the number of young workers aged 18-24 who feel comfortable opening up to … a senior leader about pressure and stress dropped sharply from 75% to 56%”.
This reiterates that real impactful change can only come by changing the way we work. Training can only go so far if it is not actually helping staff implement practical and sustainable changes. More needs to be done to help staff implement the how rather than just why.
Creating psychological safety is a much bigger task than people are realising.
Psychological safety refers to a belief that one can speak up, ask questions, raise concerns and acknowledge mistakes without fear of humiliation, negative consequences or judgment. However, we have just seen above that youngest members of the team do not even feel confident to speak up about stress at work. So when it comes to mental health, this concept of psychologically safety is immediately flawed.
Herein lays a further problem: psychological safety as a concept is too subjective.
To establish real psychological safety, you first need to establish what makes employees feel psychologically unsafe.
What behaviours are being exhibited that prevent team members from speaking up, carrying out tasks with confidence or acknowledging mistakes? Is it the behaviours that lay within the business culture or is it coming from specific leaders?
To what extent is that behaviour making each employee feel psychologically unsafe? Are they fearful of making wrong decisions, fearful of speaking up or raising concerns, fearful of how this could impact their job security, or perhaps all of the above? Do all staff feel that way, or just a few members?
The bottom line
The way we all think, feel and act comes from patterns within our own individual minds, deep rooted experiences and stagnant energy that lays within us. Therefore, the way one employee feels, accepts or responds to a culture or behaviour will vary from person to person. In which case, how do you really measure psychological safety?
To achieve real psychologically safety, you must reverse engineer it.
To feel safe is a natural survival instinct.
What is the opposite of safety? Fear.
Fear is a deep rooted human emotion with many possible triggers that can be triggered both in and out of the working environment, but still impact work performance. The way fear is triggered varies from one person to the next. So, how much can establishing and fixing a negative behaviour really change how ‘psychologically safe’ an employee feels at work without first understanding how the person responding through fear is triggered?
The only way that you can do that is to create space within the mind and body to regulate the nervous system, identify and clear the energy and then work on moving forward from that fear. To do this, employees need to be supported and given space to be accountable for their mental wellbeing needs.
All of a sudden, the solution becomes more than wellbeing. It’s more than psychological safety too. It requires a complete shift in our approach.
To achieve real psychological safety means:
To create a sustainable approach to work.
To dive deeper with less “why” and more “how”.
To create a complete shift in the way that we work and implement real achievable wellbeing habits in the workplace.
This is not just about wellbeing anymore.
Leaders need to empower their staff with new ways of working that incorporate human design.
What if there is a solution?
I believe there is, because I have it.
I’d love to chat about how I can help your team achieve sustainable mental balance alongside productivity. For more, visit www.jessicavt.com/sessions and book your free call.
I look forward to speaking with you.
Jessica Vella-Templeton