The first sign should not be a resignation

Ask a leadership team when they last learned about a wellbeing problem in the business, and the answers are usually the same three: at the exit interview, in the absence report, or when the solicitor's letter arrived. Each of those is real information. Each of them also arrives after the money has been spent.

Lagging costs, leading signals

Finance people have a name for this. Absence figures, attrition rates and claims are lagging indicators: accurate, auditable and always describing the past. By the time pressure shows up in them, it has been living in the workforce for months.

The frustrating part is that the leading signals exist. Pressure builds in patterns: workload strain in one team, trouble at home following someone in the door, a manager everyone has quietly stopped talking to. People will describe all of it honestly, in a confidential room, to a clinician who sits outside the reporting line. What almost no organisation has built is the loop that carries those themes, anonymised, back to the people who can act while acting is still cheap.

The two minute version for the CFO

You do not need a consultant to size the problem, only your own figures. Take your headcount, your average salary and your sick days per person, and absence prices itself. Take your attrition rate and a conservative replacement cost, half a salary is a gentle floor, and quiet turnover prices itself too. Then ask what even a modest shift in those two lines would be worth in a year.

We built a page that does this arithmetic for you, openly, with every formula shown: The Cost of Not Knowing. It uses your numbers, keeps them in your browser, and puts no price beside them, because the point is that invisibility is already a line in your accounts.

Seen early, problems stay small

The organisations that manage this well have not eliminated pressure. They have shortened the distance between a problem starting and leadership seeing it. A rota gets fixed before a resignation. A team gets support before an absence run. A duty of care gets documented before anyone asks for proof.

That is the whole argument. Seeing pressure early costs less than finding out late.