The Pressure Debrief

Ninety minutes with the people who manage.

A manager sees somebody’s timekeeping slip. Or watches a good person go quiet in meetings. Or notices that a bloke who always took a correction on the chin now bristles at it.

Then one of two things usually happens. He says nothing, because he does not want to open something he has no idea how to close. Or he says the wrong thing, it goes badly, and he does not try again.

Neither of those is a failure of character. Nobody has told him what he is looking at, which part of it is his to carry, or which sentences open a conversation up and which shut it down.

There is somebody in your business who was good and is not at the moment, and you could name them without thinking about it.

Their manager could name them too. So could the two people who sit nearest them.

Nobody has said anything, and everybody has a reason why not. They are private. It might be something at home. It would be awkward. Somebody else has probably already asked.

That goes on for months, and by the time it becomes a conversation it is usually a sick note.

The CIPD surveyed eleven hundred organisations. Sickness absence now runs at 9.4 days per employee per year, which is the highest it has been in more than fifteen years, and before the pandemic it was 5.8 days.

Mental ill health is the leading cause of long-term absence and the second most common cause of short-term absence.

When they asked what causes stress-related absence, the answers were heavy workload, personal circumstances, and management style.

Source: CIPD and Simplyhealth, Health and Wellbeing at Work 2025, 1,101 respondents.

Sixty-four per cent of organisations are taking steps to identify and reduce stress at work. Fifty per cent think those steps are working.

Most of what gets bought starts after the problem has already arrived. An employee assistance programme is a phone number for somebody who has reached a crisis, which is useful, and it does nothing at all in the eight months before that.

The CIPD asked what the biggest obstacle to workplace wellbeing actually is, and the answer was not budget and it was not benefits. It was that line managers do not know what to do.

Twenty-nine per cent of organisations train them. Where they do, seventy-three per cent of managers say they are confident having that conversation. Where they do not, it is fifty-seven.

Managers spot it. Often before anybody else does, because they see the person every day and they know what they were like six months ago.

What stops them is not knowing what they are allowed to ask, whether asking makes it worse, what they are supposed to do if the answer is serious, and whether they have just taken on something they cannot put down.

So they leave it, and they tell themselves it is not their place, and six months later it lands on you anyway.

What it looks like from the outside, which is behaviour rather than mood. Timekeeping. Appearance. Withdrawing from the parts of the job that involve other people. A change in how somebody takes feedback.

What sustained pressure does to sleep, and then what broken sleep does to judgement, temper, and somebody’s ability to take being told something without it going badly. I will tell you what the research actually found rather than the version of it people repeat.

What a manager can usefully say, including the sentences that open a conversation up and the ones that shut it down, and there are more of the second than people expect.

What is not theirs to carry, which is nearly all of it, and where it goes instead.

And one thing that takes people by surprise. Everybody judges themselves on what they meant, and everybody else judges them on what they did. That is true of your managers, and it is true of whoever is running the business.

The debrief is for the people who manage. The workshops run for teams or whole shifts, and they are practical the whole way through. No role play.

Half day £1,500. Full day £2,750.

It is not mental health first aid and it does not replace it.

It is not an employee assistance programme and it does not replace occupational health.

Nobody in the room will be assessed and nobody will be asked to say anything about themselves.

Nobody leaves with a workbook either. What your managers take away is what they now know and what they feel able to say.

I cannot promise you an absence figure. What ninety minutes does is change what a manager knows and what they feel able to say. What they do with that is up to them.

Where somebody in your organisation needs specialist care they get referred, and the route is agreed in writing before I set foot in the building.

Travel within ninety minutes of Plymouth is included. All other areas will incur costs, which will be communicated before you commit to anything.

A debrief answers whether there is a problem worth acting on. If there is, the Pressure Audit is the structured version and the Operating Manual maps the process underneath it.

The first conversation is forty-five minutes on the phone. It will cost you nothing more than your time, and it could be the best investment you make this year.