Workplace Wellbeing

Difficult Conversations at Work: A Practical Guide for UK Managers

By James Childs|2026-09-09T14:01:50+01:00September 9th, 2026|Mental Health and Wellbeing, Workplace Wellbeing|

Difficult Conversations at Work: A Practical Guide for UK Managers A difficult conversation at work is any exchange where you expect resistance, upset or conflict, and where avoiding it makes things worse. Handle it by preparing one clear message, opening with the specific behaviour and its effect, listening properly, and then agreeing on what changes and by when. Most managers know how to have these conversations in theory. What stops them is the two minutes before the door opens, when the whole thing feels loaded and the safest option is another week of saying nothing. This guide covers the preparation that makes the difference, a structure you can run in your head, wording for the four conversations managers avoid most, what to do when the other person cries or gets angry, and the point at which UK law says an informal chat has to become something else. That last part matters more from January 2027 than it did last year, and we'll come to why. What counts as a difficult conversation at work? Anything you've been putting [...]

Workplace Wellbeing: The Ultimate Guide for UK Businesses

Workplace Wellbeing: The Ultimate Guide for UK Businesses Written by Tahira Hussain, BABCP-accredited Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist and Director of Goldmark Training. Last reviewed: July 2026. Something has shifted in British working life over the past five years, and most organisations have felt it before they could name it. Nearly a million UK workers are now living with stress, depression or anxiety they say was caused or made worse by their job. That is 964,000 people in the most recent Health and Safety Executive figures, and it is a record. Between them they accounted for 22.1 million lost working days in a single year, which is more than three fifths of all working days lost to work-related ill health in Great Britain. Absence has followed the same curve. The CIPD's most recent Health and Wellbeing at Work survey put average sickness absence at 9.4 days per employee per year, up from 7.8 two years earlier and nearly two full working weeks per person. Behind those numbers sit the pressures that shape a normal Tuesday morning in a UK [...]