By OBI IGBOKWE

There is a health crisis unfolding quietly inside Nigeria’s most productive organisations, and most HR leaders cannot see it.

It does not announce itself the way a physical injury does. There is no accident form to fill, no insurance claim to process on day one. It arrives gradually — in the manager who stops speaking up in meetings, the high performer whose output begins to slip, the employee who calls in sick every other Monday. By the time the pattern is visible, the damage is already done.

We are talking about psychosocial stress and, in Lagos’s commercial offices, it is reaching levels that should concern every board and HR function in the country.

The numbers are not speculative. The International Labour Organisation estimates that psycho-social risks at work now contribute to over 840,000 deaths globally each year, with associated economic losses equivalent to 1.37 per cent of GDP. Nigeria is not insulated from this. A BusinessDay analysis placed Nigeria seventh among sub-Saharan African countries for workplace stress, with 50 per cent of workers affected — a figure growing at 3 per cent annually. More striking still: 70 per cent of those stressed employees are planning to leave their employers. The global average for the same measure is 55 per cent. We are not just dealing with a wellbeing issue. We are dealing with a retention and productivity emergency.

Lagos amplifies every one of these pressures. Punishing commutes. Economic volatility that seeps into the office. Hybrid working arrangements that have left 43 per cent of the workforce toggling between isolation and overload, with limited managerial support for either. EU-OSHA’s research is clear that the most corrosive psychosocial hazards are not dramatic but structural: poor role clarity, effort-reward imbalances, ineffective change management, and the quiet erosion of psychological safety that happens when organisations never measure what they cannot easily see.

Our own research at WellNewMe, drawn from 1,323 Nigerian employees, found that 64 per cent are at risk of burnout, with 60 per cent reporting physical exhaustion and 49 per cent experiencing emotional strain. These are not edge-case workers. These are mainstream employees inside mid-to-large organisations that almost certainly believe their people are fine, because nobody has told them otherwise.

That is the core problem. HR leaders in Nigeria are often working from incomplete data. Compliance frameworks and annual surveys were not designed to detect the early warning signs of psychosocial deterioration. They measure what has already happened. What organisations need, particularly in a market as pressurised as Lagos, is continuous, forward-looking intelligence on workforce health risk. 

Nigeria’s Mental Health Act 2023 has begun to shift the legal landscape, establishing protections against discrimination for employees with mental health conditions and framing psychosocial risk as a compliance matter, not merely a pastoral one. Lagos State, in its alignment with the 2026 World Day for Safety and Health theme — Good Psychosocial Working Environments — is pushing for manageable workloads, clearer role definitions, and accessible employee assistance programmes. These are welcome signals. But legislation and awareness alone will not close the gap if HR functions cannot measure the problem with any rigour.

The practical path forward starts with three things every HR director can act on now. First, move beyond annual engagement surveys toward more frequent, targeted pulse assessments that surface stressors before they compound.

Second, equip line managers, 46% of whom are themselves stressed, according to available research, with the skills to recognise early warning signs in their teams, because the manager is still the most proximate point of intervention.

Third, use data to make the business case internally. Burnout, absenteeism, and voluntary attrition all carry quantifiable costs; HR leaders who can attach a number to psychosocial risk will find it far easier to secure leadership investment.

Platforms like WellNewMe exist precisely for this gap by providing health-risk intelligence that lets HR teams and insurers see emerging risk patterns across their workforce before claims spike or talent walks out the door. But the tool is only as useful as the organisational will to act on what it reveals.

That willingness to look honestly at what is happening inside your workforce, and to treat mental health risk with the same seriousness as physical safety, is what separates the organisations that will thrive in Lagos’s next decade from those that will keep absorbing preventable losses.

The stress is real. The data are available. The only thing missing, in most organisations, is the decision to start measuring it.

•Igbokwe, a medical doctor is co-founder of WellNewMe, Lagos.