April 27, 2026

840,000 Deaths a Year: The ILO Report Every EX Leader Needs to Read

By Becky Norman

More than 840,000 people die every year from health conditions linked to psychosocial risk at work. That figure comes from a landmark new report from the International Labour Organisation (ILO), and is a major wake-up call for employers.

Research over the past few years has consistently shown rising stress levels and mental health issues directly related to work. This new report goes a step further, showing how modern work is a threat to people’s lives. For EX leaders, who sit closest to how work is designed and experienced, that distinction matters considerably.

While employee wellbeing has gradually climbed the boardroom agenda, psychosocial risk has historically been neglected. This is likely because the hazards are far less visible and more complex to address than physical safety risks.

The ILO’s new estimates make a strong case for not allowing that complexity to become a reason for inaction.

What Workplace Psychosocial Risk Actually Means

The ILO defines the psychosocial working environment as the components of work that affect an employee’s health and wellbeing, and in turn organisational performance. This includes three interrelated elements: the job itself (tasks, responsibilities, and skills); how work is managed (workload, role clarity, and support); and broader workplace policies and procedures.

The five major risk factors the report quantifies are:

• Job strain: high job demands combined with low control over how work is done.
• Effort–reward imbalance: a persistent mismatch between what people give and what they receive in return.
• Job insecurity: chronic anxiety about job stability, particularly prevalent in gig and contract work.
• Long working hours: the well-documented link between excessive hours and cardiovascular and mental health deterioration.
• Bullying and harassment: a factor whose damaging effects are increasingly recognised in formal health and safety frameworks.

The reality is that these risk factors are commonplace in organisations today. AI, geopolitical conflict, and mass layoffs compound fears over job security. Rising economic pressures, technology disruption, and gig economy growth mean long working hours are increasingly widespread. Indeed, the ILO estimates that 35% of workers globally work more than 48 hours per week.

Exposure to violence is another significant concern. The ILO estimates 23% of workers globally will experience some form of violence or harassment during their working lives, and the figures are even more troubling for those in public-facing roles. A TUC study published in April 2026 found eight in ten frontline workers faced abuse in the previous year.

Combined, these risk factors account for nearly 45 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost annually, and economic losses equivalent to 1.37% of global GDP each year.

The Invisibility Problem

The scale of the problem is substantial, and so is the challenge of seeing it clearly. Psychosocial hazards are not easily identifiable – employees are unlikely to raise concerns about heavy workloads, a bullying colleague, or a micromanaging line manager if the culture does not feel psychologically safe enough to do so.

The ILO recommends drawing on data from multiple sources to build an accurate picture of psychosocial health within an organisation, but even pooling HR records and employee survey data will only surface what employees are willing to disclose. 

AI-powered passive listening tools and sentiment analysis could play a better role here, identifying language patterns that may flag early risks. These raise clear privacy concerns, however, and would require careful governance before any implementation. And while such tools could be useful for detecting warning signs, they do not address the root cause, which is primarily one of poor workplace design.

Preventing Psychosocial Harm Through Employee Experience Design

This is where EX leaders have an important role to play. Psychosocial safety is fundamental to healthy, thriving workplaces, and the risk factors the ILO identifies directly overlap with the conditions that undermine employee experience. Unmanageable workloads, unclear expectations, lack of recognition, and poor manager quality all contribute to the outcomes EX leaders are most concerned with: disengagement, erosion of trust, depleted discretionary effort, and growing intent to leave. The ILO figures show what happens when those warning signs are not designed out of the way an organisation operates.

“For EX leaders the more important question isn’t who owns this risk, it’s what created it in the first place,” says Danny Seals, VP of People Transformation and Experience at RAKBANK. “Psychosocial harm often gets indirectly designed into work, or shows up as a second-order impact, only visible once the design is done and by then it’s too late.”

The science helps explain why. Evelina Dzimanaviciute, Founder and CEO, Elite Mind says: “Most organisations already know that wellbeing programmes are not working – the ILO report tells us the price of that failure. The real answer lies in human neurobiology. We have evolved to be shaped by our environment, and when work triggers a chronic threat response, we create a maladaptive nervous system problem. People do not perform or innovate from a place of fear. Organisations build systems and processes without asking: how will this environment shape the humans inside it? That question becomes even more urgent as AI is introduced.”

Seals advocates for interrogating psychosocial risk at the level of micro-experience design – examining every workplace service, product, interaction, and experience for the conditions it creates. He suggests five design dimensions worth examining:

• Space: whether recovery has been built into the physical environment, or whether the design optimises purely for efficiency – overlooking the moments when people need to step back and decompress.
• Senses: what it genuinely feels like to be in a role for eight hours straight, and whether that experience has been designed from the perspective of the person living it, or from the assumptions of those designing it.
• Situation and State: whether design accounts for the full range of conditions a role moves through – from moments of calm to states of overwhelm or aggression – rather than only the average or ideal scenario.
• Slack: whether breathing space exists in the working day and in the workload, and critically, whether that space is there by intention or by accident.
• Story: whether the narrative an organisation tells about itself is reflected in how people actually experience working there – because when the story and the reality diverge, trust fractures with it.

Addressing Psychosocial Risk at Work Requires More Than Good Design

Good work design is necessary, but it is not sufficient on its own. CIPD research shows that most employers are already taking steps to manage work-related stress and support mental health, but fewer than half believe their efforts are effective. This is a gap that points to something structural.

“We need more systematic and risk-based approaches to support better psychological health at work,” says Rachel Suff, senior wellbeing adviser at the CIPD. “Good work design alone isn’t enough – it must be supported by a culture that recognises and promotes physical and mental health and encourages employees to speak up about concerns. This includes equipping managers to handle sensitive wellbeing conversations, offering access to resources such as employee assistance programmes and counselling, and ensuring effective channels for employee voice and conflict resolution.”

For EX leaders, this is familiar ground. Manager capability sits at the heart of most EX strategies, and psychosocial risk is one more reason to treat it as a non-negotiable investment rather than a nice-to-have.

“Ultimately, managing psychosocial risk is about creating an environment where people can thrive, not just cope,” Suff adds.

The Frontline Burden

Frontline and customer-facing employees are at heightened risk of psychosocial harm. The nature of those roles demands persistent emotional labour, adjustment to unpredictable schedules, and, particularly over the past few years, the management of rising levels of customer aggression. Workers in contact centres, retail, and hospitality also carry specific anxiety about job security as AI matures and automation extends further into their work.

A 2024 study by meQuilibrium found that nearly two-thirds (61%) of frontline workers are more likely to experience depression, and 33% are more likely to experience anxiety, than their non-frontline counterparts. They are also less likely to seek help.

High attrition is a likely consequence of poor psychosocial health, and in a customer setting this can lead to degraded service quality, loss of institutional knowledge, longer handling times, and lower rates of first-contact resolution. The link between poor psychosocial conditions and poor customer experience is clear, yet many organisations continue to prioritise short-term cost-cutting that ultimately erodes both.

The use of AI introduces a particular tension here. AI is increasingly deployed to improve customer experience efficiency, yet many of the conditions it introduces or intensifies – closer monitoring, reduced autonomy and higher throughput expectations – are the psychosocial risk factors the ILO report identifies as most damaging. That makes it especially important for EX and HR leaders to be in the room when AI-driven decisions about customer experience are on the table, to ensure the human cost is part of the calculation.

Designing Work That People Can Thrive In

The latest ILO figures are a clear reminder that psychosocial risk is not a niche safety concern that can be addressed through an isolated wellbeing initiative. 

EX leaders need to look seriously at root causes rather than symptoms, and design those causes out of the employee experience. A practical starting point is a structured psychosocial risk assessment that maps against existing EX data. Where are the roles with the highest strain, lowest autonomy, or greatest exposure to customer aggression? Those are the places to look first.

Culture must also not be forgotten: the conditions that make it safe to speak up, to rest, and to raise concerns must be actively built, not assumed. And now is the time to make the business case explicit; the 1.37% of GDP figure is a powerful anchor for a board-level conversation.

With World Day for Safety and Health at Work falling on 28 April, it’s a timely moment to consider whether we are designing work that people can genuinely thrive in, or work that functions while causing harm.

Becky Norman is the Employee Experience Editor for CXM. With 14 years in digital publishing, she champions the organisations and practitioners creating exceptional experiences for their people — and driving measurable impact on customer success as a result. Prior to this role, Becky spent eight years as editor of B2B publications HRZone and TrainingZone, covering the most pressing issues facing HR, people, and learning leaders. In 2020, she co-created Culture Pioneers – a global campaign recognising the organisations shaping workplace culture to drive both business performance and employee experience.