Every day, employees walk into work carrying experiences their colleagues and managers may know nothing about. A project manager processing the tragic loss of a sibling. A sales rep navigating the aftermath of an abusive relationship. An engineer contending with the ways in which having a parent with substance misuse affects how they respond to stress and conflict to this day.
Though often undiscussed in the office day-to-day, trauma is not rare. It is not confined to veterans or survivors of major disasters. Rather, it’s a pervasive part of the human experience and, by extension, the workforce. Yet, most organizations don’t recognize the impact it has. Those that do – that respond with care, understanding, and structured, proactive support – can create an environment where employees carrying trauma feel safe enough to move from surviving to thriving. And in doing so, they ensure their entire organization becomes healthier and more resilient for the long term.
This is what it means to become a trauma-informed workplace. In this article, we share more about why and how to become one.
The Scale of Trauma Among Today’s Employees
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) defines trauma as the result of “an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual wellbeing.”
According to the World Health Organization, over 70% of people worldwide experience at least one traumatic event in their lifetime. In the United States, the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System found that nearly 64% of U.S. adults reported at least one adverse childhood experience, and over 17% reported four or more – the threshold at which compounding psychological, behavioral, and health effects become significantly more pronounced. Certain demographic groups, including women, members of the American Indian and Alaska Native population, and multiracial adults, reported even higher percentages.
While most traumatic experiences do not result in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the condition is more common than many people realize. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that approximately 6.8% of U.S. adults will experience PTSD in their lifetime, with around 3.6% – roughly 13 million Americans – affected in any given year. Women are disproportionately affected: their lifetime prevalence is nearly double that of men.
Even without resulting PTSD, many people who’ve experienced trauma exhibit subclinical symptoms: stress responses that don’t meet the definition of a formal diagnosis, but that still shape how they function, relate to others, and engage with their work. They also have a high risk of developing anxiety, depression, substance abuse disorders, and other psychiatric conditions.
These statistics represent a meaningful portion of the workforce. In any given organization, you may have numerous people managing intrusive flashbacks, hypervigilance, difficulty concentrating, severe self-doubt and low self-esteem, insomnia, or emotional numbness while also trying to meet deadlines, collaborate with their coworkers, and perform consistently.
How Individual Trauma Can Show Up in Organizations
That list encompasses just a selection of the ways trauma can present. Research from the University of Kansas breaks them all down into three main categories:
- Hyperarousal – Constant vigilance that disrupts focus
- Intrusion – Triggered flashbacks and surfaced memories that recreate the traumatic experience
- Constriction – Emotional detachment and avoidance
For employers, these clinical manifestations of trauma appear in numerous non-clinical ways, affecting employees’ concentration, collaboration, retention, productivity, and healthcare utilization more broadly. Such effects may appear to managers and fellow team members as poor performance, disengagement, or hyperreactivity if they don’t know the root cause.
The impacts have significant economic costs as well. A 2022 study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry estimated the total excess economic burden of PTSD in the U.S. to be $232.2 billion – $66 billion of which comes from healthcare expenses. Much of that burden falls on employers: adults with PTSD lose an average of 10 excess days per year to absenteeism and 33 days to presenteeism, amounting to an estimated $34.8 billion in productivity losses annually across the U.S. workforce. And because many more employees carry subclinical symptoms that never receive a formal PTSD diagnosis, the true costs of trauma are likely far higher.
It’s possible for organizations to significantly mitigate, and even prevent, these costs to both their employees and their organizations on the whole. How? By fostering psychologically safe, trauma-informed work cultures bolstered by proactive mental health support that provides consistent, compassionate employee engagement and easy, expedited access to care.
How to Build a Trauma-Informed Workplace
Becoming a trauma-informed workplace doesn’t mean your HR team becomes therapists, handling every hard conversation. It means you establish a culture that continuously communicates the message: You are safe here. We understand and want to help. Support is available at all times, no matter what your needs are.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), in collaboration with the CDC, established their guiding principles for trauma-informed organizations: safety, trust and transparency, peer support, collaboration and mutuality, and empowerment.
There are many ways organizations can embed the policies and practices that embody these principles into their fabric. Here are some practices we recommend:
Make psychological safety visible and felt.
Twenty years ago, most employees hadn’t heard of the term “psychological safety.” It was coined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson in 1999 and defined as a shared belief among team members that they are safe to speak up, ask questions, take risks, and make mistakes without fear of humiliation or retaliation. As the concept’s popularity has risen over the years, its definition has expanded to include the sense of safety in sharing one’s struggles and discussing mental health at work.
Today, 89% of employees consider psychological safety essential to their wellbeing and performance, findings from Pew Research Center show. The smart organizations know it’s important for them, too: teams with high psychological safety consistently outperform those without it, according to Google’s Project Aristotle, the company’s landmark study on team effectiveness, which identified psychological safety as the single most important factor in high-performing teams.
Much of psychological safety comes down to trust. Organizations build such trust and safety by normalizing conversations about mental health, rewarding people for speaking up, encouraging leaders to model vulnerability and share their own failures and struggles, and ensuring employees never face retaliation for being honest in sharing theirs.
Train leaders in trauma-informed communication.
Leaders and managers are not mental health professionals, and we should never expect them to be. However, it is extremely helpful and important to provide training on mental health and trauma-informed language so they know how to invite conversations without pressuring disclosure, respond when someone shares something difficult, recognize when an employee may need more resources, and point them to the appropriate place. Even simple things, like clearly communicating in advance who is going to be in a meeting and where exactly a meeting is taking place, can help reduce the anxiety of someone impacted by trauma.
Offer accommodations around mental health concerns.
Trauma responses can be unpredictable. Triggers often happen without warning, causing employees to have difficult days when they don’t expect them. Organizations with rigid policies that provide no accommodation can force people to choose between their health and their job – a difficult scenario for both parties. Offering schedule flexibility, mental health days, and transparent, easy-to-start processes for requesting accommodations reduce that friction. Plus, according to the Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice, expanding flexibility in these ways can reduce burnout by as much as 36%.
Create confidential reporting pathways.
Employees navigating trauma need to know they can raise concerns without fear of exposure or retaliation. This is particularly pertinent when an employee’s trauma intersects with the workplace, for instance, in situations of harassment or escalated conflict. Anonymous reporting options, third-party channels, and clearly communicated confidentiality policies can reduce barriers to seeking help and build the institutional trust that underpins psychological safety.
Prioritize connection and peer support.
Trauma can be profoundly isolating, and isolation makes symptoms worse. Intentional connection between employees provides a direct countermeasure, helping them feel less alone. Outside of ordinary work relationships, organizations can foster meaningful connection for employees through peer support programs, mentorship, and employee resource groups (ERGs). For example, several organizations have designated ERGs for veterans, who may feel more comfortable discussing their experiences with others who’ve also served. These measures especially matter for remote and hybrid teams, where connection of any kind is often limited to meetings with dedicated work goals.
Bottom line: employees need places and times to connect on personal grounds to feel a greater sense of belonging and peer support. When they do, a study by BetterUp shows, their job performance increases by 56%, turnover risk drops by 50%, and they take 75% fewer sick days.
Getting Proactive: Reach Employees Long Before Crisis
A supportive organizational culture creates the conditions for safety, but culture alone is not sufficient to support employees dealing with trauma. They also need consistent, accessible mental health support that reaches them before an emergency hits, as well as the moment they become triggered.
This is where traditional EAPs consistently fall short. Even newer digital EAPs still follow the conventional setup, functioning primarily as crisis-response tools for employees who are in acute distress and seek help themselves. For someone navigating the longstanding weight of past trauma, that bar is often too high.
Journey Proactive EAP works differently. By embedding support into the daily flow of work and continuously engaging employees – through regular touchpoints, live and on-demand digital content, voluntary check-ins, in-person events, collaborations with HR and wellbeing teams, and signals from our Journey Signal™ AI intelligence engine – we reach employees early, even before anyone else might know they’re struggling. Our approach goes further, too, providing content series and other resources about navigating trauma and specific experiences within it.
These proactive measures are crucial, because they reduce the very conditions that can cause trauma responses to escalate: chronic stress, social isolation, and the silent sense that no one would notice or understand what you’re going through. Here, the system tells them they’ve got support right away, whenever they need or want it, and then maintains consistent, ongoing outreach – all of which increases efficacy and lowers the costs downstream.
In fact, Journey Proactive EAP clients consistently achieve 30% employee engagement or higher, because we meet employees where they already are rather than waiting for them to come to us. With such high engagement, a new analysis shows, Journey prevents an average of 17 high-cost clinical visits per at-risk employee per year, resulting in approximately $5,000 savings in healthcare and productivity costs per employee and as much as a 6x return on investment.
Readying Your Organization
We need to build workplaces where no employee has to navigate difficult experiences alone. The question isn’t whether your organization has employees impacted by trauma, but whether you’re equipped to meet them with compassion, structure, and consistent support at all points along the continuum of their symptoms and care needs. If you’re not yet there, it’s a good time to start.
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Learn how Journey Proactive EAP can help your organization build a psychologically safe, trauma-informed culture. Request a demo today.
