Workplace anxiety isn’t just a personal health issue. It’s often a workplace design issue. In one national poll, 43% of U.S. adults said they felt more anxious than the year before. And in a recent survey of U.S. workers, 80% described their workplace as toxic, with toxic culture cited as a top driver of poor mental health.
Reducing workplace anxiety represents a real opportunity since it affects job performance and employee engagement, among other HR metrics. The good news: many of the biggest drivers are systemic and solvable with clearer expectations, better manager support, healthier boundaries, and easier access to care.
What is workplace anxiety?
Workplace anxiety is characterized by worry, dread, or stress that’s triggered or worsened by work. This type of anxiety can be tied to uncertainty, workload, interpersonal dynamics, or a lack of control.
When an employee experiences daily, ongoing work stress, it increases the presence of anxiety-causing hormones. These hormones can lead to decreasing quality of life as the sufferer deals with insomnia, exhaustion, dreading work, and generally feeling unsettled in daily life. These feelings tend to stick around for as long as the person remains in an anxiety inducing environment.
What are some symptoms of workplace anxiety?
These can be signs of workplace anxiety, burnout, or another mental health concern. However, only a licensed clinician can diagnose workplace anxiety disorder.
- Feeling overwhelmed, anxious, and exhausted, both at work and during non-work hours
- Dreading going to work
- Insomnia, poor productivity, and inability to focus
- Feeling of having a pit in the stomach or sinking feeling when thinking about work or while going to work
- Worrying about work during off hours, unable to “turn off” from work mode
- Feeling isolated, burned out, and having a bleak outlook on life
These symptoms are likely to be present for as long as the employee stays in the environment that’s causing them.
Workplace anxiety is not an individual failure or caused by personal weakness. It’s a product of systemic working conditions, and can affect anyone spending time within these conditions.
What causes workplace anxiety?
The following traits can be causes:
Work design
- Unrealistic workload, constant urgency, unclear priorities.
- Low autonomy, little control over how work gets done.
Manager and team dynamics
- Micromanagement
- Inconsistent feedback
- Bullying, exclusion, favoritism, unresolved conflict.
Culture and norms
- Always-on expectations (after-hours email, instant replies)
- Stress as a status symbol (“busy = valuable”)
Uncertainty and change
- Reorgs and layoffs
- Unclear expectations
- Lack of a career path
The impact of workplace anxiety on marginalized social groups
Workplace anxiety doesn’t land evenly. Employees who are marginalized because of race, gender identity, disability, sexual orientation, age, language, or immigration status may face additional stressors at work, from bias and microaggressions to unequal access to opportunity and psychological safety.
Unequal power relations present in wider society are often recreated within the workplace. Marginalized people necessarily experience more anxiety from harmful power relations, compounding the effects of regular workplace anxiety.
It is imperative that HR leaders take into account the multiplicity of people’s experiences when thinking about how to create workplaces where anxiety isn’t part of the culture.
How can HR leaders restructure workplaces to reduce workplace anxiety?
- Rethink work schedules. Allow employees more autonomy and flexibility, so people with care work and other responsibilities can better handle multiple burdens. Burnout is less of a factor when people have the ability to adapt their work schedule to the complexities of their lives. Hybrid work is one way to institute flexibility.
- Offer diversity training. HR leaders must be at the forefront of ongoing diversity training and continually learning about intersectionality. Although the impact of workplace anxiety is relevant for all employees, there are also specific burdens unique to the individual circumstances of their lives.
- Address toxic power relations. Empower your people leaders with leadership training and institute policies that make it clear to supervisors that they must lead with respect for their employees' humanity.
- Encourage work/life boundaries. Employees must have space to be off work, without expectation to be available 24/7. Allowing employees space away from work is actually better for productivity and reducing anxiety. Everyone in the office must abide by this, and leaders should lead by example.
- Make space for “deep work.” Create specific days or times for deep work also allows employees to be more productive while doing work that actually matters. Over half of U.S. employees say their work frequently involves busy work.
What HR can do to reduce workplace anxiety
HR leaders are uniquely positioned to take on workplace restructuring in a way that creates environments where systemic anxiety is not the norm. You can help advocate for and institute policies that put employee wellbeing at the forefront, and make workers feel heard, respected, and cared about. A few suggestions:
- Clarify what matters. Define “what good looks like” for roles and projects. Reduce ambiguous performance signals.
- Equip managers. Train for psychologically safe 1:1s, early detection, and supportive referrals. Standardize how managers handle boundaries and workloads.
- Redesign norms (boundaries + deep work). Establish team response-time norms. Protect focus time (meeting-free blocks) and reduce “busy work.”
- Build inclusion into daily operations. Address bullying and bias with real accountability. Make reporting safe and anti-retaliatory in practice, not just policy.
- Make care easy to access—and safe to use. Promote confidentiality clearly. Normalize care-seeking via manager scripts, internal comms, and leadership modeling.
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