WONE Pushes Continuous Stress Intelligence as Alternative to Annual Employee Surveys

Ed Shee, chief technology officer at WONE, said annual surveys provide a single data point that says little about direction. “One data point a year tells you almost nothing about direction,” he said. “Two people can score the same when one of them is recovering and the other is declining, and they need very different things from you.”

According to Sifted, the risk is that managers who lack information about whether a team member is under stress cannot respond with safeguards. That can lead to burnout, high absenteeism and poor staff retention, outcomes the report says are avoidable if businesses adopt better ways to measure how people are performing.

WONE, described as a preventative platform for workplace stress, uses three main data points. They include a monthly, scientifically validated psychometric assessment; data from wearables that track stress-related physiological markers; and conversations with WONE’s AI performance coach Ori, which helps employees interpret their own data and coping strategies. Sifted noted that employees may stop answering honestly once they believe their employer can see their data.

Lydia Roos, WONE’s chief scientific officer, described the framework as “stress intelligence.” “At its core, stress intelligence is an individual capability, in the same way that emotional intelligence is,” she told Sifted. “It’s the ability to detect stress signals early, interpret what they mean across your psychological, behavioural, and physiological systems, and respond in ways that support recovery and sustained functioning.” She said the framework was built on decades of stress and coping research and is a trainable skill.

Roos said organisations can create conditions that make stress intelligence possible. She said those that promote it understand the impact chronic stress has on cognitive performance and decision-making, treat rest and recovery as necessary for sustained output, and pay attention to the balance between pushing people to learn and grow and overworking them to the point where they leave.

WONE also aims to give managers visibility. Most annual surveys are anonymised and aggregated at company-wide level, meaning a serious problem in one team might not appear in the data. Roos said nobody can act on the result: managers cannot, and neither can the person who filled it in, because employees never see their own answers come back. The company ends up with an average that washes out differences between teams that are doing well and teams in serious trouble, she said.

When a whole group’s scores drop in the same domains at the same time, Roos said, that signals something structural needs to change, whether workload, resourcing or management. WONE is designed to help managers intervene proactively rather than wait for burnout. “In a reactive model, none of that is visible until people start leaving or calling in sick, and by then you’re paying for the problem instead of preventing it,” she said.

Sifted reported that WONE’s data also underscores the need for team leaders to foster their own stress intelligence. Managers are often an unsupported cohort in stress management, and those with weaker resilience resources were around three times more likely to report burnout, according to the report.