By Jennifer Thamm, CIRM, Chair of IRM Switzerland
A recent publication by the International Labor Organization estimates that just under 1.4% of global GDP is lost per year just from people-psychosocial risks. That is not an HR ‘soft issue’. It is an unpriced exposure for your business, and the most forward-thinking boards are beginning to treat it like one.
So I ask this one important question:
Where does psychosocial risk sit in your register?
In most organisations, the honest answer is “nowhere.”
Many risk frameworks have a glaring blind spot. We employ experts to calculate financial exposure and control fraud and operational risk, yet we operate blind on people-related ‘psychosocial’ risk. Fewer than 35% of employees report good overall wellness, according to a 2026 Gartner study. That figure is no longer an HR footnote. It is a business performance risk. Too often the root cause of a failure is not a market shift, a project delay, or an operations breakdown; It’s a build-up of people factors, originating from inside and outside the office, often influenced by a person’s past experiences.
After 20+ years of watching people and psychosocial challenges drive commercial problems, I reached a turning point when my previous CEO and CFO both died by suicide. I decided to dedicate my skills and experience in risk management and organizational transformation to help prevent costly people issues, avoidable loss of life, and the mental health challenges that affect both business performance and personal lives.
At that time, I evaluated how we could extend our ERM program to properly cover people risk and found no way to gather the data without compromising individual privacy. I wrote my MBA dissertation on executive-level stress and then founded SaysLife, a specialty technology firm for people risk management, to close that gap.
Bridging the Gap: Integrating Ethical Rigor, Regulation and Reality
The market and the rules have matured since the 2020 pandemic. In some larger regions, health and safety regulation now extends to employee wellbeing and mental health. The EU’s CSRD requires double materiality that includes employee wellbeing reporting for in-scope companies. ISO 45003 provides a standard for managing psychological health and safety at work. The challenge for the modern risk manager is clear: How do we apply the discipline of ISO 31000 and ISO 45003 to human behavior and psychosocial risks?
I have spent the last two decades working at the intersections of organizational and digital transformation and risk governance. We do not need more generic engagement surveys or one-size-fits-all wellbeing programs. We need structured frameworks that allow us to:
- Identify Early Leading Indicators (KLIs): Moving away from reactive metrics (absenteeism) to predictive indicators (stress-related early signals).
- Integrate Privacy-First Governance: Utilizing methodologies that allow employees to voice concerns securely, without fearing they are being monitored by “Big Brother.”
- Quantify the Financial Impact: Aligning psychosocial risk data with financial modeling to justify resource allocation to the board.
Some companies have responded with “bossware”: software that tracks an individual’s activity and keystrokes, or that evaluates potential new hires, increasingly powered by AI. We are seeing some backlash, with large class action lawsuits over privacy and employment equality violations popping up. It shows that technology used in people decisions needs human oversight and governance, like any other high-impact system.
A new generation is already moving
Due to the urgency for people-focused leadership and high-performance work cultures, a number of programs and grassroots initiatives have begun over the last few years to mitigate various types of people-related risks.
One example of this is the organisation called Millenials4Boards. Mitigating the psychosocial risks around leadership and business relevance, their vision is to transform corporate governance by increasing millennial representation in boardrooms and fostering a collaborative ecosystem of mentorship and cross-industry insight exchange. The current top concerns they mitigate are pinned on human supervision of AI HR tools and operational policies fitting a generationally dispersed working environment.
“For the first time in history, five generations are working side by side, while the workforce in advanced economies is shrinking and aging. By the mid-2030s, Millennials, Gen Z, and the first Gen Alpha adults will make up the large majority of that workforce. Each generation entered work with different formative experiences, so shared assumptions about communication, loyalty, fairness, or how technology should feel at work can no longer be taken for granted. Gen Z in particular is reshaping expectations faster than most organizations are adapting policy, and that mismatch shows up directly as retention risk.”
– Stephan Hillert, President Millenials4Boards
The Kindness Games (TKG), founded in 2020 by Tim Wenzel and Lee Oughton, takes a cultural route. The organisation teaches leaders to build trust and remove fear from corporate culture.
“Culture was telling us that if you thought, looked, or identified a certain way; then you had to fear, battle, and hate those on the other side.”
– Tim Wenzel, Founder The Kindness Games
Tim rejected this notion and began to lift people through TKG shout-outs on LinkedIn, quickly turning into a global movement. By 2021, the Leading with Kindness leadership philosophy was formed and ‘TKG’ became a leadership and organizational culture development company.
The road ahead – Safeguarding Our People
We have a unique opportunity to redefine corporate governance. The organisations that thrive will treat people risk with the same seriousness as financial risk. Too many boards still suffer from “FOFO”, the Fear of Finding Out. Those Boards that move past this fear and measure the human impact of their work environments can help stop the leakage of presenteeism and absenteeism before it hits the bottom line.
As technology evolves rapidly, it is possible to implement automated solutions that protect employee privacy while reducing people risk exposures. I expect to see this specialization pick up significantly in the coming months and years.
So now, I return to my opening question…Where does psychosocial risk sit in your register?…
Jennifer Thamm, CIRM, is Chair of IRM Switzerland and founder of SaysLife, providing companies a private and simple approach to govern, prevent and manage people related risks using their market-leading and ethical automation called ARISE (Actionable Risk Insights to Support Employees). She works with risk, HR, EHS, and M&A teams to define relevant leading indicators for psychosocial risk and to benchmark their approach against ISO 45003. Connect with her at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferthamm/ or https://sayslife.com/
Sources:
ILO 2026: https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/840000-deaths-year-linked-psychosocial-risks-work
