The pace of change in the workplace is accelerating, with organisations adapting to become more agile in response to rapid developments in AI and a turbulent global economy. While CTOs have more tools than ever to measure technology performance, the industry standard for assessing how a company’s people are coping under pressure has barely changed in decades. The annual employee survey, a single data point giving a yearly snapshot of workforce health, tells managers very little about an employee's wellbeing — and whether it is improving or declining.
"One data point a year tells you almost nothing about direction. Two people can score the same when one of them is recovering and the other is declining, and they need very different things from you," says Ed Shee, CTO at WONE, a preventative platform for workplace stress. The risk to businesses and their people is real. If managers lack the information they need to know if a team member is under stress, they are unable to respond with the appropriate safeguards that will keep their team, and the business, healthy. The results — burnout, high rates of absenteeism and poor staff retention — are avoidable, if businesses adopt better ways to measure how their people are performing.
Modern software and hardware is unlocking new ways for managers to look after their people, turning stress from a once-a-year guess into something that can be measured continuously and acted on early. The era of Stress Intelligence.
London-based WONE offers an alternative to the annual workplace survey by combining three main data points to give employees and managers a more continuous assessment of workplace stress levels. These include a monthly, scientifically validated psychometric assessment; data from wearables to track stress-related physiological markers; and conversations with WONE's AI performance coach Ori, which helps employees interpret their own data and coping strategies. The moment employees believe their employer can see their data, they stop answering honestly. Chief Scientific Officer Lydia Roos describes how WONE combines this data to teach something called Stress Intelligence.
"At its core, stress intelligence is an individual capability, in the same way that emotional intelligence is," she tells Sifted."It's the ability to detect stress signals early, interpret what they mean across your psychological, behavioural, and physiological systems, and respond in ways that support recovery and sustained functioning. We built the framework on decades of stress and coping research, and it's a trainable skill."
Roos points out that while Stress Intelligence is enacted at the individual level, organisations can create the conditions that make practicing this form of pressure management possible.
"Organisations that promote stress intelligence get the impact that chronic stress has on cognitive performance and decision-making," she says."They treat rest and recovery as necessary for sustained output and performance at work, because that's what the science says. They pay attention to the balance between pushing people enough that they learn and grow and overworking them past the point where they don't have the brain space to grow, and end up leaving instead."
Giving managers visibility Most annual surveys are anonymised and aggregated on a company-wide level, meaning a serious issue in one team might not be visible in the data.
"What that means in practice is that nobody can act on the result. The manager can't, and the person who filled it in can't either, because they never see their own answers come back," says Roos. "What the company ends up with is an average which washes out differences between teams that are doing well, and ones that are in serious trouble." On top of helping individuals to understand their own capacity to manage stress, WONE can give managers visibility when there's a problem in a particular team, so that they can intervene early.
The platform also features the Ori AI performance coach to guide employees through coping strategies. By shifting from annual snapshots to continuous monitoring, businesses can identify stress patterns before they lead to burnout, creating a healthier, more resilient workforce.
Key entities extracted: Companies: WONE; People: Ed Shee, Lydia Roos; Locations: London.