Five Things CEOs Can Do to Reduce Stress in the Workplace

There is a moment many senior executives recognize but rarely talk about. You’re not panicking. You’re not burned out—at least not officially. You’re performing, delivering results, and showing up to every meeting. And yet, somewhere between the fourth decision of the morning and the last email at night, you realize your patience is thinner, your thinking is narrower, and your recovery time has quietly disappeared.

This experience is no longer exceptional—it’s common. The pace of disruption has collapsed the time that leaders once had to reflect, recalibrate, and reset. Economic volatility, AI-driven change, geopolitical uncertainty, regulatory pressure, and nonstop connectivity have combined into a constant cognitive overload. The danger is not that leaders feel stressed. It’s that stress becomes normal and with it, diminished clarity, shorter tempers, and organizations that feel perpetually on edge.

Teams mirror what leaders model. When leaders operate in a state of sustained pressure, stress becomes embedded in how work gets done. The cost is not just wellbeing. It is performance, trust, and the long-term health of the enterprise.

Consider the warning signals employers can’t ignore:

• A 2025 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimated the annual employer cost of employee burnout/disengagement states at about $4,000 for an hourly employee, $10,800 for a manager, and $20,700 for an executive. For a 1,000-employee organization, that equated to roughly $5 million per year.
• Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report found that global employee engagement fell to 21%, and that lost productivity associated with disengagement cost the global economy $438 billion.
• The CIPD’s Health and Wellbeing at Work 2025 report cited stress as a major cause of sickness absence—26% (short-term) and 28% (long-term) among respondents’ top causes. The primary cause was heavy workloads (41%).
• Senior leaders are not immune. In AlixPartners’ 2026 Disruption Index, a survey of 3,200 CEOs and senior executives, 40% said they felt more anxious than the year before, 45% feared losing their jobs, and 85% said they need greater professional and personal support.

What senior executives can do—starting with themselves 

If you want a calmer organization, you can’t lead it like a human battery that never recharges. Executive stress is contagious; it shapes tone, urgency, and how safe people feel telling the truth. Here are five actions senior executives can take now—based on what I’ve seen working with top-performing CEOs across the country—to  reduce stress while improving execution, starting with themselves.

1) Treat energy like a strategic asset (and manage it publicly) 
Leaders often model the exact behavior they say they don’t want: midnight emails, calendar pileups, no recovery time. Build “energy governance” into your week: no-meeting blocks for deep work, protected recovery windows, and a hard stop you actually honor.

2) Reduce decision load before it reduces you 
When everything feels urgent stress levels spike. Install a simple disruption triage: a one-page list of the “top five disruptive forces” the business is actively prioritizing this quarter, and what you’re explicitly deprioritizing. Clarity is cortisol-reducing.

3) Build a personal support system that matches the job 
The CEO role can be isolating, and isolation amplifies strain. Use a three-layer support stack: a confidential peer forum, an executive coach (or therapist), and a “truth-teller” inside the company empowered to challenge your assumptions.

What senior executives can do for employees: fix the stressors, not just the symptoms 

Most corporate stress programs over-invest in coping and under-invest in causes. Meditation apps can help—but they can’t compensate for chronic overload, unclear roles, and leaders who reward exhaustion.

1. Attack workload as the #1 design flaw 

Do a quarterly “workload reset” with three moves:

• Stop: identify two low-value recurring meetings/reports to eliminate.
• Simplify: reduce approval layers and handoffs.
• Staff: resource the work you refuse to stop.

2. Make stress visible with metrics that matter 
Add a “stress and capacity” dashboard alongside financial KPIs: absence trends, regrettable turnover, engagement by manager, and pulse data on workload and role clarity.

3. Train managers to be early-warning systems 
Most burnout forms in the messy middle: unclear priorities, conflicting demands, silent overwhelm. Train managers to spot and address it early—especially around workload renegotiation, psychological safety, and boundary-setting.

4. Build connection as a stress buffer, not a “culture nice-to-have” 
Loneliness and isolation amplify stress and degrade performance. In a 2025 WHO release on social connection, Dr. Vivek Murthy described loneliness and isolation as “a defining challenge of our time,” pointing to downstream health and economic outcomes.  Create structured connection: team rituals, cross-functional “collision” time, mentoring, and manager expectations for inclusion.

5. Take burnout seriously because it’s expensive—especially at the top 
The 2025 burnout cost modeling isn’t theoretical hand-waving; it translates burnout into employer dollars, with executive burnout modeled at about $20,683 per executive annually.   If you want to protect performance, protect people’s capacity to perform.

The executive takeaway 

Workplace stress is not a soft issue, and it is not inevitable. It is a predictable outcome of how leaders allocate attention, prioritize work, and model behavior under pressure.

CEOs who treat stress as background noise eventually pay for it in slower decisions, brittle cultures, and avoidable talent loss. Those who address it deliberately—by managing their own capacity, simplifying what the organization is asked to carry, and holding managers accountable for sustainable performance—create a different operating system altogether.

In a volatile environment, the strongest leaders are not the ones who absorb the most pressure, but the ones who prevent unnecessary pressure from distorting judgment, draining trust, and weakening the enterprise over time.

Written by Jason Richmond.
Have you read?
How to Achieve Your Yearly Goals: 5 Science-Backed Steps to Stay Consistent.
Stop Self-Sabotage: 3 Common Leadership Habits Killing Your Success.
The Future of Leadership: Why “Intentional Design” is the New Strategy.
Davos 2026: The 5 Critical Questions Facing Global Leaders This Year.
Closing the Gender Gap: The Importance of the Female Quotient in the C-Suite.