Work-Related Stress and Safety: How Psychological Overload Raises Accident Risk

Stress is usually seen as a matter for psychology or HR, but in reality it has a direct and tangible impact on physical safety in the workplace. From an occupational safety and health (OSH) perspective, an employee’s psychological overload is not just a question of feeling worse. It is a critical risk factor that significantly increases the likelihood of an accident at work.

A stressed worker is slower to spot hazards, reacts more slowly, makes mistakes more easily and is more likely to take shortcuts. A forklift driven by an exhausted operator, machine work under pressure to hit a target, or running an installation after yet another shift in a row – in situations like these, stress stops being a “soft” issue and becomes a direct threat to health and life.

In this article, we explain the psychophysiological mechanism that links stress to errors, show where the risk is highest and set out the specific steps an employer should take to reduce it.

How does stress lead to an accident at work? The causal chain

To understand how stress leads to accidents, we need to look at the sequence of psychophysiological reactions that take place in the body under prolonged or intense pressure. An accident is rarely a single, sudden event – it is usually the last link in a chain that starts much earlier.

When faced with a threat, the body triggers the “fight or flight” response: it releases adrenaline and cortisol, speeds up the heart rate and tenses the muscles. In the short term, this mechanism is useful. The problem begins when the pressure lasts for weeks – the state of mobilisation becomes permanent, and the worker’s mental and physical resources are gradually depleted.

Loss of focus and tunnel vision

Under severe stress, the brain narrows its attention to a single, most pressing problem. This is known as tunnel vision. A worker focused on finishing a task before the deadline stops noticing what is happening on the periphery: an approaching forklift, a warning signal, a missing machine guard. Stress also overloads working memory, making it easier to skip a step in a procedure, mix up the order of actions or misread a gauge.

Chronic fatigue and slower reactions

Prolonged stress disrupts sleep and recovery, and lack of sleep translates directly into poorer psychomotor performance. Fatigue research (including Dawson and Reid, Nature, 1997) has shown that after about 17 hours awake, performance drops to a level comparable to a blood alcohol concentration of 0.05%, and after 24 hours to about 0.1%. A fatigued worker reacts more slowly, judges distance and speed less accurately, makes less precise movements and experiences microsleeps – lapses of attention lasting a few seconds. When operating machinery, driving or working at height, these fractions of a second decide whether an accident happens.

Mental and practical shortcuts

An overloaded worker looks for ways to win back time and energy. The easiest is to skip steps that do not speed up the job: putting on personal protective equipment, locking out a machine before intervening (LOTO), checking the condition of a tool. Thinking works in a similar way – a tired brain relies more on simplifications and habits than on analysing the situation. Every such shortcut reduces the safety margin until, eventually, an error is no longer corrected and an incident occurs.

Stress and accidents at work – data and the highest-risk sectors

The scale of the problem is considerable. In the European OSH Pulse 2022 survey (over 27,000 workers in the EU), 46% of respondents reported severe time pressure or work overload, 37% overall fatigue related to work, and 27% stress, depression or anxiety caused or made worse by work. The next edition, OSH Pulse 2025, confirmed this picture: 44% of workers report severe time pressure and 29% work-related mental health problems.

In Poland, according to preliminary data from Statistics Poland (GUS) for 2025, 66,733 people were injured in accidents at work, 189 of them fatally. The most frequently reported cause was incorrect behaviour of the employee – 41.9% of causes. Behind this category, there are very often the effects of overload: inattention, haste, fatigue and skipped procedures. The highest accident rates were recorded in mining (15.94 per 1,000 employed), waste management (12.55), healthcare and social care (7.71) and manufacturing (7.70).

Although stress affects every sector, its consequences for safety are most serious where a moment of inattention can end in injury.

There is one common denominator: the greater the pressure and the less control workers have over the pace of work, the more often errors and risky behaviour occur.

How can employers reduce stress and the risk of accidents?

Under Article 207 § 2 of the Polish Labour Code, the employer must protect employees’ health and life by providing safe and hygienic working conditions, making appropriate use of scientific and technical progress. Protection against the effects of stress falls within this duty – the law does not limit it to physical, chemical or biological hazards. However, it requires a systematic approach rather than one-off initiatives.

Stress in the occupational risk assessment

Article 226 of the Labour Code requires employers to assess and document occupational risk. A growing number of companies – in line with EU-OSHA recommendations and the ISO 45003 standard on managing psychosocial risks – also include psychosocial factors in this assessment. In practice, it is worth:

• identifying jobs with high time pressure, shift or night work, monotony, or contact with difficult customers or patients,
• collecting data: employee surveys, feedback from conversations, absenteeism, staff turnover, analysis of accidents and near misses,
• asking, when analysing every accident, not only “what happened” but also “under what conditions the injured person was working” – were they tired, under pressure, after overtime,
• defining preventive measures and regularly checking how effective they are.

Work organisation that reduces stress

The most effective measures are those that remove the source of stress rather than just easing its symptoms:

• realistic targets and deadlines – set together with the people doing the work, allowing time for safety tasks,
• respecting working time and rest periods – controlling overtime, ensuring 11 hours of daily rest and 35 hours of weekly rest (Articles 132–133 of the Labour Code), ergonomic shift schedules,
• breaks at work – especially for monotonous work, work that requires constant vigilance or work in difficult conditions,
• control over how the work is done – where possible, giving employees freedom to organise their tasks,
• a clear division of roles and responsibilities – eliminating conflicting instructions and unclear expectations,
• consulting the workforce – under Article 237^11a of the Labour Code, changes to work organisation that affect safety must be consulted with employees or their representatives.

Supporting managers and OSH training

A direct supervisor has the greatest influence on stress levels in a team – they can either increase it or reduce it effectively. That is why it is worth:

• training foremen, team leaders and managers to recognise the signs of overload and fatigue (irritability, withdrawal, poorer quality of work, more frequent minor mistakes),
• introducing a rule that a worker who is too tired or otherwise unable to work safely can report it without fear of consequences,
• including stress, fatigue and human factors in periodic OSH training,
• providing access to psychological support, for example through an employee assistance programme (EAP) or a broader wellbeing at work programme,
• preventing bullying (mobbing) and conflicts, which are among the strongest sources of stress (Article 94³ of the Labour Code).

Summary

Work-related stress is not just a well-being issue but a real accident risk factor. It reduces concentration and causes tunnel vision, slows down reactions, increases fatigue and encourages shortcuts. Each of these links raises the likelihood of an error – and when working with machinery, vehicles or at height, an error can mean a serious accident.

Data from GUS and EU-OSHA show that the problem is widespread and that employee behaviour remains the most common cause of accidents. Rather than looking for blame on the human side only, it is worth asking under what conditions the person was working. Including stress in the occupational risk assessment, sensible work organisation and well-prepared managers lead directly to fewer accidents, lower absenteeism and a more engaged team.

How can EHS Consulting help?

We help employers in Poland include psychosocial hazards in their occupational risk assessment, analyse the causes of accidents taking human factors into account, and run OSH training and workshops for managers on recognising and reducing overload in their teams.

Sources

• EU-OSHA, OSH Pulse 2022 – Occupational safety and health in post-pandemic workplaces
• EU-OSHA, OSH Pulse 2025 – summary
• Statistics Poland (GUS), Accidents at work in 2025 – preliminary data (in Polish)
• Dawson D., Reid K., Fatigue, alcohol and performance impairment, Nature 388, 1997
• ISO 45003:2021 – Occupational health and safety management – Psychological health and safety at work – Guidelines for managing psychosocial risks
• Act of 26 June 1974 – Polish Labour Code (Articles 94³, 132–133, 207, 226, 237^11a)