Employers have many things to contend with and this can create problems of where their focus should be. Government incentives can affect this decision and this ultimately leads to businesses preoccupying themselves with one specific issue, rather than dividing equal time to equally important matters.

UK companies are leaders in terms of health and safety, with 96% (Vigeo report) of them implementing such policies, which puts them in a better position than other countries on that metric. This can be attributed to the fact that employers are offered financial stimulus to put health and safety strategies in place.

However, British employers are lagging behind their European counterparts in terms of implementation of measures to deal with stress in the workplace, according to statistics released by social responsibility measuring company Vigeo.

A report from Vigeo claims that only 45% of UK companies report on stress prevention strategies, suggesting that Britain may lag behind France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Spain. Among the British companies that have been taking steps to tackle the problem, two in five applied advanced measures.

According to the World Health Organisation, stress at work is a major challenge for corporate social responsibility and is equally common in developed and developing countries. Laetitia Charrier, analyst at Vigeo, commented that stress prevention policies in many countries, including in Britain, could be improved.

Meanwhile, the research also found that Britain has relatively low level of transparency on absenteeism rates, with less than one in five businesses reporting on their rates of absenteeism. Charrier explained that this fact is related to the lack of legal obligation to report on these rates in the UK, as opposed to countries like France, Sweden and the Netherlands, where companies are required to submit data on absenteeism.

In a challenging economy stress is more prevalent in the workplace, therefore employee benefits that fall within the ‘protection’ context should not be solely based on cure, but should look to implement measures that consider prevention.