Stress is the new traffic jam: everyone's stuck in it, nobody wants to be

We used to complain about traffic on the A2. These days we complain about our mental traffic jam. That feeling of your head working overtime while your body has long since come to a standstill. And it's not just a feeling, it shows in the numbers too.

The numbers are pretty confronting
The latest annual figures from occupational health services ArboNed and HumanCapitalCare show that Dutch employees have called in sick far more often because of stress-related complaints over the past five years. Absence due to stress has grown by 36 percent in that time. Almost one in four sick days in the Netherlands is now related to stress. And that number keeps rising: by 8 percent in the past year alone.

If you drop out because of this, you're not away for just a week. Employees who go off sick with stress are, on average, unable to work fully or at all for 36 weeks. With burnout it's even longer, at ten months. That's not a bout of flu, that's almost an entire school year.

Why this shouldn't surprise you
The culprits aren't that surprising when you think about it: the pressure to be always available and always switched on, staff shortages that leave the work of three people with one person, and a field of work that keeps changing because of technology. Keep that trio running for a while, and your brain will put on the brakes by itself. Only your body picks the moment, and it's usually not a convenient one.

The problem with, put out the fire first, prevent later
Many organizations only react when someone actually drops out. Then comes a conversation, a reintegration plan, maybe a coach. Admirable, but too little, too late. By the time someone is at home, the creeping process of sleeping worse, a shorter fuse and less and less energy has been going on for a long time. Nobody saw it, because nobody was structurally looking.

And that's exactly the difference between solving absence and preventing it.

At Vitsall, we prefer to turn it around
We don't believe in waiting until people are stretched to the limit. With our vitality scan, we map out who in your organization is at risk of dropping out, well before anyone reports sick. Instead of putting a plaster on afterwards, you see up front where the first signals are: restless sleep, getting irritated more easily, less energy. Precisely the stages that, according to occupational health services, precede real stress-related absence.

Employees who are in the danger zone are matched with a coach. Completely private, so the employer never sees who is being coached. What an employer does notice: less absence, lower absence costs, and a team that has some breathing room again instead of running on empty.

Prevention is simply easier than repairing a ten-month burnout
Some stress is part of work, and that's fine. Chronic stress that leads to months of absence doesn't have to be. The difference lies in how early you see it coming.

Curious what this looks like for your organization? Get in touch with us. We're happy to look into it with you, before it becomes a traffic jam you can no longer drive around.