Several years ago I received a call from Irish Rail asking about our employee wellbeing consultancy. During the call they shared with me something tragic. Seven people had died by suicide in one month. Members of the public who had jumped in front of trains.
As you can imagine, the impact on the train drivers was profound. How do you continue in your job or sleep well at night and recover from such a traumatic incident without the right workplace trauma support?
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard about workplace trauma and organisations are starting to recognise the need to look at workplace trauma support that goes beyond EAP schemes and six sessions of counselling.
Because situations like this are happening across industries, every single day. And most organisations still don’t know how to help the people at the centre of it all.
As a trauma informed therapist and trainer I’ve held thousands of sessions to help people process the most unthinkable trauma, and combined with my HR background, I share with you what workplace trauma is, and how to become a trauma informed organisation.
What Is Considered Workplace Trauma?
When most people hear the word trauma, they think of what I refer to as ‘big T’ trauma. They associate trauma with war zones, accidents where someone lost their life, hostage situations, or abuse.
But as I have come to witness, trauma is far more nuanced than.
Workplace trauma is any experience at work that overwhelms the nervous system’s ability to cope. It can be a single, acute event such as a those many people face every day in the emergency services.
Or it can be micro traumas, things that happen that we’re not expected that leave an emotional imprint.
Workplace trauma can include:
- Bullying, harassment, or discrimination
- Witnessing traumatic incidents (accidents, violence, death)
- Accidents at work
- Sudden job loss or repeated restructuring
- Chronic overwork and emotional exhaustion
- Vicarious trauma from supporting others in distress
- Working under a toxic or emotionally volatile manager
When an experience exceeds what the nervous system can process and integrate, trauma takes hold.
And here’s what most organisations are missing: it doesn’t have to be dramatic to be devastating.
Can Workplace Trauma Cause PTSD?
Yes. PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) or CTPSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) can both be experienced as a result of events at work.
If the job is one of working for the police, paramedics or other front facing emergency services, it’s highly likely, people will be exposed to events that have the potential to create trauma.
What it is perhaps important to highlight however;
Not Everyone Who Experiences a Traumatic Event Will Be Traumatised
This is one of the most important things to understand about workplace trauma.
Experiencing something traumatic doesn’t automatically mean you’ll develop trauma. According to the World Health Organisation, around 70% of people globally will experience a potentially traumatic event in their lifetime. Yet only 5.6% go on to develop PTSD. Source: WHO Fact Sheet, 2024; https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/post-traumatic-stress-disorder
Think about that for a moment. Two people can witness the exact same incident at work, an accident, a violent episode, the sudden death of a colleague, and have completely different responses. One person processes it, integrates it, and moves forward. The other carries it for years.
So what’s the difference?
It’s not about strength. It’s not about who’s tougher or more resilient. Research tells us that factors like prior trauma history, the level of support available after the event, how emotionally regulated someone is, and whether someone feels a sense of control all play a significant role in whether a traumatic event becomes lasting trauma.
What we also know, and this is critical for organisation, is that it’s never just about the incident itself. It’s about how we’ve internalised it. The meanings we’ve attached to it. The beliefs it’s created.
Take a workplace accident. The person involved might not just be dealing with the shock of what happened. They might be blaming themselves. Believing it was their fault. Believing they’re incompetent, or a bad person, or that they should have done something differently.
That’s why trauma treatment that only focuses on the event misses the point entirely. You have to process the memory, the emotions, and the beliefs that formed around it.
The good news? Because not everyone who experiences something traumatic will go on to be traumatised, early intervention and the right kind of support can make an enormous difference. You can interrupt the process before it takes hold.
Can Workplace Bullying Cause Trauma?
When I left my HR career and began working as a Solution Focused Psychotherapist 14 years ago, one of my first clients was an HR leader who came to me with CPTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). She was literally shaking.
She’d been signed off work and shared with me she was barely eating, was experiencing daily panic attacks, couldn’t sleep and was literally crumbling before my eyes.
The reason? Years of being bullied by the HR Director.
Fast forward 14 years and I’ve lost count of the amount of people I’ve supported who’ve experienced workplace bullying. Many leave their jobs due to the bulling, only to find themselves on emergency alert in their new job role. Trauma doesn’t get left behind because a person changes jobs, the experience lives in the nervous system and get’s brought with them into the next role, until it’s processed with the right mental health support.
Here are what the current statistics have to say about workplace bullying;
- Up to 35% of employees have experienced workplace bullying (Civil Mediation UK / Uncovering The Truth: Bullying In The Workplace Statistics 2024)
- 75% of employees have witnessed workplace bullying behaviour (Key Workplace Harassment Statistics in 2023)
- 62% of workplace bullying cases result in the victim’s resignation (Key Workplace Harassment Statistics, 2023)
- 30% of Americans have suffered abusive conduct at work (2021 WBI US Workplace Bullying Survey Details: Another 19% have witnessed it; 49% are affected by it)
Bullying doesn’t have to be dramatic or obvious. Sometimes it’s the death of a thousand cuts. And organisations that dismiss it as ‘a personality clash’ are missing the long-term cost entirely.
What Does Workplace Trauma Actually Look Like?
Workplace trauma doesn’t look like someone breaking down at their desk. Most of the time, it looks like this:
- People pleasing and overworking to avoid disappointing others
- Emotional withdrawal after receiving feedback
- Avoiding visibility, promotions, or speaking up in meetings
- Hyper-vigilance: constantly overthinking, scanning for signs something is wrong
- Conflict avoidance, even at the cost of their own needs or boundaries
- Chronic self-doubt or imposter syndrome
- Being the “reliable one” who never asks for help”
During our mental health training for managers at Sofology we trained over 200 managers during COVID. In that training, and despite it being online, I clocked five instances of undiagnosed PTSD among the attending managers (when you’ve worked with trauma for a long time, it’s very easy to spot).
These were managers showing up every day, holding their teams together, and none of them knew what they were carrying.
Not all of these managers had trauma from workplace experiences. One manager for example, had been involved in a car accident where another person died. The weight of that and the trial was something he’d been carrying for over a year. What I was confident about was the ability to process the trauma, and the emotions many were experiencing as a result such as guilt, shame and anxiety in a single session. So that’s what happened!
“Thank you very much for taking the time to meet with me yesterday. I found the session very moving. I am feeling good today, still processing the session but I do feel like a weight has been lifted, I know that sounds cliche but I do feel lighter”. – Manager, Sofology”
“I really want to thank you, because I’ve had a really rough couple of days and normally I would have been all over the show with how I’m feeling and what’s going on and I would have deffo have had multiple panic attacks… but I haven’t. It feels such a relief. Thank you so much!” – Manager, Sofology”
How Does a Work Environment Affect Mental Health?
I saw Adam Kay’s show at the Edinburgh Festival a couple of years ago. Among the laughter, he shared something that stopped the room.
Every three weeks, an NHS doctor takes their own life. Every week, a nurse dies by suicide.
The medical profession has the highest rates of alcoholism of any profession. Because when you’re exposed to death, trauma, and grief every day and there is no workplace trauma support in place, you find a way to cope alone.
I worked with an anaesthetist who came to me for help with sleep issues caused by 12-hour shifts in intensive care. One morning she arrived directly from a night shift and mentioned, almost casually: ‘We only lost two people last night.’
When I worked at Brighton and Sussex University Hospital as an HR Business Partner, every month I sat in front of the strategy board being asked what was being done to reduce absence. I remember thinking we were doing everything we could. But I also remember feeling that there had to be a better way.
There is, and that’s why I now do the work I do.
Why EAP’s and Talking Therapy Isn’t The Right Approach for Workplace Trauma
Most organisations, when faced with an employee who’s struggling after a traumatic experience, do the same thing. They refer them to the EAP provider where they can access counselling.
And those things have their place. But here’s what most organisations don’t know.
When it comes to trauma specifically, talking about it isn’t always the answer. It can actually make things worse.
The mind doesn’t know the difference between imagination and reality. When someone with trauma recounts what happened, in detail, in a session, week after week, the mind doesn’t experience that as a memory. It experiences it as the event happening again. Right now. In this moment.
That’s not a theory. NHS clinicians themselves have raised concerns about retraumatisation during therapy for PTSD. A 2024 study published in ScienceDirect surveyed 348 clinicians working with PTSD patients in the NHS. Concerns about retraumatisation were identified as a barrier to delivering trauma-focused therapy. Source: ScienceDirect, 2024 — https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0887618524000896
This is exactly why we developed Treating Trauma the Easy Way.
Not because trauma isn’t serious. But because there is a much easier way for people to process it. One that doesn’t require them to talk about what happened. One that doesn’t require them to relive it in order to release it.
Our approach works directly with the mind and the body to process the event, the memories, and all the emotions and beliefs that have formed around it. Because trauma is never just about the incident. It’s also about how we’ve internalised it.
And we can measure the results. We use a Subjective Units of Distress scale, a SUDs rating, where we ask people to rate their level of distress at the start of a session, and re-rate it at the end. No details required. No sharing. No camera on.
In our studies, 90% of people experienced a significant reduction in their trauma response.
One of the most powerful examples was a CEO who was a survivor of 9/11. He came along to one of our group sessions. We didn’t ask him to share anything about his experience. We simply asked him to rate his distress at the start. He rated it at a 10.
Less than an hour later, it was at a zero.
There is no talking therapy that can achieve that kind of result at that kind of speed. And what makes our approach genuinely different is that we can deliver it at scale. Whether you have ten people or a thousand, we can take them all through the same process. Every single person can measure their own results in real time.
For many people, it sounds like a magic bullet. We understand that scepticism. Which is exactly why we offer organisations the opportunity to run it as a pilot first.
How to Create A Trauma Informed Workplace
If you want to create a trauma-informed workplace, the first thing to accept is that it’s not a quick fix.
I’ve worked with so many organisations that are looking for exactly that. They want to put their managers through a one-hour webinar on mental health training.
Except that’s not how it works. Not when we’re talking about something as significant as trauma.
So where do you start?
Start with your managers.
Your managers are the people your employees turn to when things get hard. They’re the ones having difficult conversations, managing absence, holding their teams together under pressure.
And most of them are doing that without any real understanding of how trauma shows up at work.
Most managers are promoted because they’re brilliant at their jobs. Nobody told them they’d also need to understand why a high performer suddenly starts avoiding their one-to-ones. Or why someone bursts into tears over what seems like minor feedback. Or why a previously confident team member has gone quiet.
But that’s the reality of managing people.
If your managers can’t recognise what they’re looking at, they can’t respond in the right way.
Our mental health training for managers covers trauma. It covers how to recognise it, how to have conversations that support rather than inadvertently make things worse, and how to create genuine psychological safety within a team.
But that’s not something you achieve in an hour.
If you want training that actually changes how your managers show up for people, you need to give it the time it deserves. We recommend refresher training every six to twelve months. New managers join. The conversation evolves. And this topic is important enough to keep coming back to.
Think about how you approach sales training. You don’t train your sales team once and assume they’re set for life. You invest in it repeatedly because you know it drives results.
Mental health training deserves exactly the same commitment.
Look honestly at your culture.
Culture isn’t what’s written on your values wall. It’s what actually happens on a Tuesday afternoon when someone’s struggling and their manager doesn’t know what to say.
So how do you know where you actually are?
Start by asking your people. Anonymous surveys, one-to-ones, focus groups. Ask them whether they feel safe raising concerns. Ask them whether mistakes are met with curiosity or blame. Ask them whether they’d feel comfortable telling their manager they weren’t coping.
The answers will give you a great place to start from, even if they make for uncomfortable reading.
Look at your data too. High absence rates, high turnover, low engagement scores, these aren’t just HR metrics. They’re signals. According to a 2024 Built In Culture Report, 61% of employees would leave their job for a company with a better culture. If your people are leaving, it’s worth asking what they were experiencing that made them go.
Look at how your leaders behave day to day. Not in town halls and company updates. In the small moments. How does a manager respond when someone misses a deadline? What happens when someone admits they’re not coping? Is vulnerability modelled at the top, or is it quietly discouraged?
I was coaching one woman in leadership who worked for a big UK bank. She was a senior leader and when I asked about culture her words were “people would rather throw someone under a bus than take accountability for their actions”.
Harvard research is clear on this: 70% of an employee’s experience at work is based on their manager’s behaviour. Which means culture change has to happen at manager level. Not just at the top.
And look at your processes. Your performance management. Your absence reviews. Your redundancy procedures. Ask yourself honestly, do these feel fair and transparent to the people going through them? Or do they feel like something being done to them?
A trauma-informed culture isn’t built overnight. But these are the places to start. Because when people feel genuinely safe, genuinely heard, and genuinely supported, everything else follows.
Review your HR policies.
Your policies tell your people something. Whether you intend them to or not.
They tell people what happens when they get things wrong. What happens when they’re struggling. What happens when they raise a concern. And how they’re treated when things get difficult.
So when you’re reviewing your policies through a trauma-informed lens, here’s what you’re actually looking for.
Performance management. Recently I spoke to an HR Director who shared with me that the organisation were spending around £100,000 a week on absence. I nearly fell off my chair. They had been dealing with the issue through performance management, even dismissing people, which in this Unionised company was unheard of. Yet despite their efforts, absence wasn’t budging. They recognised they needed a totally different approach. This is something we cover when training managers – whether to manage a situation through performance management, or as a mental health situation.
This is an important distinction to make. If someone is struggling with mental health and trauma, performance management may not be the right approach.
Absence and return to work. When someone has been off with a mental health condition or trauma-related illness, how are they brought back? How are they supported when they are on leave? This is again where mental health training for managers can play a big part in creating psychological safety. One senior leader I was supporting with trauma and anxiety relayed to me the ‘welfare call’ she’d had with her manager when she was on leave. He’d asked her ‘do you feel better, worse or the same?’. She’d been very aware of how uncomfortable her manager was on the call, so it hadn’t been a great conversation.
How you handle organisational change. Redundancy, restructuring, and changes in leadership are all events that can trigger a trauma response in people who’ve been through them before. The way you communicate change matters as much as the change itself. Are people told early? Honestly? With clarity about what happens next? Or do they find out through the grapevine and spend weeks in uncertainty?
Your grievance and disciplinary procedures. These are the moments that matter most. When someone raises a concern about bullying or a hostile manager, are they protected? Are they believed? Or does the process feel like something that protects the organisation rather than the person in it?
You don’t need to overhaul everything overnight. Start by reading your policies with fresh eyes and asking one question: if someone who was already struggling had to go through this process, would it feel safe?
Invest in Workplace Trauma Support
This is where I see an opportunity for organisations to take a leading edge approach and do something different
Because when your people get the right support, the change isn’t just personal. You see it in their teams, performance, employee engagement and productivity. You see it in your culture. You see it in your results.
Creating a trauma-informed workplace isn’t something you achieve overnight. But every step you take in that direction makes a real difference to the people who show up for you every single day.
Ready to create a trauma informed work place? Schedule a call to discuss how we can support you from our trauma informed management training, workplace wellbeing consultancy to our workplace trauma support.
