Key Organisational Health Trends - Looking Ahead to 2026

As we move toward 2026, organisations are entering a period marked by uncertainty, acceleration, and increasing pressure on people and systems. Rather than offering definitive predictions, this review brings together informed insights based on our direct experience working with organisations, current scientific literature, and the organisational, economic, and social movements shaping the world of work.

Looking back at 2025, several psychosocial risks became particularly visible and persistent. These risks do not emerge in isolation; they reflect structural changes in how work is designed, managed, and experienced. Understanding them is essential not only to mitigate harm, but also to anticipate where organisations must invest if they want to remain sustainable, healthy, and resilient.

This overview highlights the risks that stood out most clearly in 2025 and the strategic trends we believe will shape organisational health in 2026, not as quick fixes, but as deeper, systemic responses to increasingly complex demands.

• High cognitive and emotional demands

The mental processes required to accomplish work tasks and to regulate emotions while doing so demand significant resources and, if not rigorously managed — especially when associated with a high work pace — can have a significant impact on employee performance and well-being, leading to fatigue, stress, decreased job satisfaction, and reduced productivity.

• Offensive and unethical behaviour in organisations

Given the nature of offensive and unethical behaviour in organisations, their mere presence, even if limited, is alarming. It is not necessary to exhibit a moderate or high risk of offensive behaviours such as moral and sexual harassment for them to have serious consequences in the organisational context. Specifically, the mere presence of offensive behaviours, even with a low overall risk, has serious impacts on organisational culture, particularly in terms of experienced security and trust, as well as on workers’ well-being and performance.

• Vicarious trauma

Professionals who deal daily with trauma victims are at great risk of developing vicarious trauma, which refers to alterations in their beliefs, abilities, needs, value systems, and self-image due to the indirect contact with others’ trauma required by their profession. In addition, vicarious trauma is associated with conditions such as burnout, compassion fatigue, depersonalisation, and secondary traumatic stress. Given this increasingly relevant risk, continuous monitoring of teams exposed to specific stressors (social and healthcare professionals, psychologists, crisis hotline and emotional support workers, journalists, etc.) is necessary to prevent vicarious trauma.

These risks, among others, have visible health consequences, including stress, sleep problems, burnout, and, in particular, a reduced ability for individuals to recover on a daily basis.

With this in mind, organisations are focusing on prevention, aiming to reduce risks in the organisational environment before serious consequences develop, while not neglecting the need for intervention when required.

Given the risks involved, several effective strategic trends stand out as ways to strengthen the resources of both organisations and individual workers:

• Psychological First Aid

Psychological first aid aims to mitigate the long-term negative effects of trauma through prevention and intervention strategies. It equips employees and managers with methods for acting in crisis situations and in daily work, helping them to identify their own limits and recognise critical circumstances, while providing comfort and restoring the functioning of people in crisis.

• Empowering middle management

Training middle managers to promote healthy environments is an essential step, particularly through developing their literacy in recovery strategies (encouraging breaks, emotional regulation, conflict management, etc.), as well as strengthening constructive feedback and social skills (empathy, sensitivity, assertive communication, etc.). This approach supports the creation of environments that promote health, collaboration, and transparency.

• Promoting flexibility and autonomy

Flexibility and autonomy are essential resources for promoting health, productivity, and engagement, acting as buffers against work-related stress. When supported organisationally and by leadership, they enhance motivation, satisfaction, and performance, while mitigating risks associated with high cognitive and emotional demands.

• Job design

Job design and redesign are among the most powerful ways to make organisational environments inclusive of all types of workers. The ability of managers to adapt roles, introduce flexibility, and remove barriers allows a diversity of talents to flourish — particularly those that previous systems may have prevented from thriving. Conducting an organisational assessment to identify context-specific risk factors is critical to successful, health-promoting job design.

• A safe and supportive environment

Fostering a supportive environment is key to preventing high burnout, enhancing engagement, commitment, and satisfaction, and establishing healthy boundaries. Psychological safety is equally vital, enabling collaboration, open expression of ideas, and innovation through constructive risk-taking.

Several key trends will stand out in 2026, a year in which it will become clear that organisations must move beyond “quick fixes” and invest in understanding the root causes of psychosocial risks in order to act effectively and sustainably.

To translate trends into informed decisions, we will be hosting an online session dedicated to the organisational health trends shaping 2026. Grounded in data from organisational assessments, empirical research, and cross-sector insights, this session moves beyond interpretation into evidence, clarifying what organisations are actively prioritising, investing in, and expecting in response to growing psychosocial and performance pressures.

Join us on the 15^th of January, from 4:00 to 5:00 PM. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/vg95_ALKSB2Nj7tmt9xa5g

References 

Gouveia, S. (n.d.). Primeiros Socorros Psicológicos, Encontro dos Psicólogos do Sul. Cruz Vermelha Portuguesa. Disponível em: https://www.cruzvermelha.pt/images/pdf/Encontro_DRS_OPP_SusanaGouveia.pdf

Sjöberg, O. (2025). Managing emotional demands and work intensity in interactive service work: a comparative study of organizational safety measures and control. Employee Relations: The International Journal, 47(9).

https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-10-2024-0595

Spence, R., Bifulco, A., Bradbury, P., Martellozzo, E., & DeMarco, J. (2024). Content Moderator Mental Health, Secondary Trauma, and Well-being: A Cross-Sectional Study. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 27(2). https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2023.0298

Sutton, L., Rowe, S., Hammerton, G., & Billings, J. (2022). The contribution of organisational factors to vicarious trauma in mental health professionals: a systematic review and narrative synthesis. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2021.2022278

Yandi, A. (2022). Literature review analysis of the effect of leadership, organizational culture, and work environment on employee productivity. International Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary, 1(1), 12-24.