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Your People Are Sending Signals. Is Your Business Listening?

The ‘S’ in ESG Is More Than a Metric

When businesses talk about social impact, the conversation often skews external – supply chains, community investment, and modern slavery statements. But the most immediate social impact any organisation has is on the people inside it. And right now, the data on “people sustainability” tells a stark story.

CIPD figures show that average employee sick days rose to 9.4 days in 2024, up from 7.8 days in 2023 (a staggering 60% higher than pre-COVID levels of 5.8 days). Mental ill health is the leading cause of long-term absence. This isn’t a post-pandemic blip. As Jonathan Hook explains, it has become embedded in the workplace experience.

“Sickness and absence aren’t a blip from COVID. It is now anchored in the workplace experience, and it’s moving to a phenomenal cost for business. It’s moved away from a wellbeing agenda to a critical performance and cost management issue.”

— Jonathan Hook, CHX Performance

For businesses already navigating an evolving regulatory landscape, the message is clear, people sustainability is no longer a soft metric. It is both a material risk and an opportunity.

Feelings Are Data, Not a Distraction

One of the most powerful reframes in this conversation is the idea that feelings are not the opposite of productivity. They are its foundation. Jonathan and Damien draw on cognitive neuroscience to explain that emotions and mood are biological stress signals. They tell us how well-resourced we are to meet the demands before us.

When organisations create environments that cause people to suppress or mask how they feel, they are, in effect, stripping out one of the most important performance datasets available; worse, they are making people expend energy hiding stress rather than resolving it.

The consequences are not abstract. A leader arriving at work in what the CHX model calls a ‘disruptive mood’ (tired, anxious, stressed) will perceive their team’s work differently, make biased decisions, and cast a biological shadow over the people around them. Team members, in turn, become emotionally triggered. Trust erodes. Engagement falls. Eventually, people leave, or stay and quietly disengage.

“If you’re not investing in leadership behaviours, in governance, and the things that determine how people feel — this kind of wellbeing spend isn’t wellbeing. It’s compensation for harm. You’re just putting a plaster over the damage that your environment is causing your people.”

– Jonathan Hook, CHX Performance

This is where the link to governance becomes essential. The ‘G’ in ESG (how decisions are made, how leaders behave, how cultures are set) directly determines how people feel at work. Social impact starts at the desk.

Why DEI Initiatives Stall and How to Fix It

The conversation takes a candid look at why so many Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes fail to deliver lasting change. The answer, Damien and Jonathan argue, lies in disconnection: DEI becomes a cause rather than a business lever, and it is often experienced as something being done to people rather than with them.

Jonathan is direct about the consequences. When DEI is performative, it doesn’t just fail to land. It actively breeds cynicism and disengagement.

The biological lens offers a more durable foundation. Inclusion and equity are not HR pie charts. They are core human needs. As fundamental as certainty and safety. When those needs are met, discretionary effort, trust, and collaboration follow naturally. When they are not, people either leave or stop performing.

Damien shares a telling example: a senior DE&I leader with five years of committed effort at a large global firm, unable to shift the culture despite her best efforts, who moved to a different organisation in a less ‘purpose-aligned’ role and thrived. The lesson, it is not always what you are doing. It is who you are doing it with, and in what environment.

How to Get Started: Five Needs, One Framework

So where does a business begin? Damien and Jonathan offer a practical starting point built around five core human needs that leaders can use as a daily compass:

• Certainty        
• Inclusion
• Autonomy 
• Attachment
• Equity

“If leaders approach their teams with those five needs at the front of how they operate, that’s putting feelings at the heart of how you do business, and it’s a very straightforward model to use.” – Damien Stork, CHX Performance

When people have these needs met, primarily by the leaders and systems around them, they feel psychologically safe. Engagement, trust, and creativity follow. When those needs go unmet, biological stress accumulates. Burnout, absence, and attrition are the results.

Jonathan’s final provocation to business leaders is worth sitting with:

“Poor well-being in the workplace is not a pathological response to a great environment. It’s a completely normal and predictable response to a pathological environment.”

In other words, if your people are struggling, start by looking at the system, not the individuals within it.

What This Means for Your ESG Strategy

At FuturePlus, we work with businesses across the full spectrum of Climate, D&I, Social impact, Economic impact, and Environment. One of the most consistent gaps we see is between an organisation’s environmental ambitions and its investment in the social and governance foundations that make those ambitions achievable.

The evidence is clear,  businesses that want to perform, have engaged teams, lower absence rates, achieve stronger retention rates, and build a culture people are proud to be part of need to treat “people sustainability” with the same rigour they bring to carbon reporting.

That means measuring what matters. It means building leadership behaviours that create certainty, inclusion, and psychological safety. It means closing the gap between what your organisation says it stands for and what people actually experience inside it.

If you’d like to understand where your organisation stands on social impact and people sustainability, get in touch with the FuturePlus team, or explore our free ESG course at future-plus.co.uk/esglessons.

Listen to the full episode of the Business of Sustainability podcast, featuring Damien Stork and Jonathan Hook of CHX Performance, wherever you get your podcasts. Find out more about CHX Performance, here.