Why trauma-informed principles belong in the workplace too

We have become increasingly familiar with the idea of trauma-informed practice in schools, healthcare and social care. In the workplace, however, the language can still make people uncomfortable. Work is work. Adults are expected to cope. Managers are not therapists.

All of that is true, to a point. But adults do not leave their nervous systems, histories or current life pressures at the door when they arrive at work. Trauma-informed practice does not mean asking managers to diagnose employees, inviting people to disclose painful personal experiences or turning every performance conversation into a counselling session. Nor does it mean removing standards, accepting harmful behaviour or avoiding accountability.

It means understanding that threat, unpredictability, shame, exclusion and power can affect how people think, relate and respond. It then asks a more useful organisational question:

Do our everyday practices reduce avoidable threat and support people to regulate, participate and perform, or do they inadvertently make those things harder?

What workplaces can learn from trauma-informed schools

A 2022 study by Helen Stokes explored how one secondary school implemented trauma-informed positive education over two and a half years. Rather than treating it as a separate wellbeing initiative, the school integrated trauma-informed practice into its approach to teaching, behaviour, relationships and leadership. The research examined how students were supported, how teachers developed consistent practice and how leadership enabled the change.

The model focused on five interconnected domains: body, relationships, stamina, engagement and character. In practice, this meant supporting self-regulation, developing relational trust, building capacity gradually, cultivating interest and flow and helping students recognise their strengths and values.

Importantly, this was not delivered through a one-off training session. It involved whole-school learning, leadership participation, co-created practices, ongoing reflection, personalised coaching and feedback. The school also moved away from predominantly punitive responses towards a more proactive and restorative approach. The findings included a more orderly environment for learning, more positive attitudes towards school and student perceptions of effective teaching time moving from the bottom to the top quartile within the state comparison.

This was a case study of one school, not a workplace study, so we should not simply assume that identical interventions will produce identical results in organisations. The transferable insight is more fundamental: wellbeing and performance are not separate systems. The conditions that help people feel safe enough to regulate and relate are also part of the conditions that enable them to learn, contribute and perform.

Adults can also become dysregulated at work

Workplaces can contain considerable uncertainty and threat. Restructures, redundancy, bullying, discrimination, public criticism, opaque decision-making, poorly handled investigations, sudden changes in responsibility and fear about job security can all affect a person’s sense of safety.

Sometimes the source sits outside work. Bereavement, caring responsibilities, financial pressure, illness, relationship breakdown or previous experiences may shape how someone responds to what is happening now. We do not need to know a person’s history to recognise that their capacity may be affected.

At work, this might show up as withdrawal, defensiveness, avoidance, over-explaining, difficulty processing information, heightened sensitivity to feedback, emotional reactivity or a sudden drop in performance. It may also show up through less visible responses: overworking, perfectionism, people-pleasing, saying yes to everything or appearing composed while using enormous internal effort to remain that way.

None of these behaviours automatically indicates trauma. They can have many explanations, and managers should not attempt to diagnose the person in front of them. The trauma-informed shift is from certainty to curiosity. Rather than immediately deciding that someone is difficult, disengaged or lacking commitment, we pause long enough to consider what may be happening within the interaction, task, environment and wider system.

Psychological safety does not mean psychological comfort

One concern about trauma-informed practice is that it will make managers reluctant to challenge people or hold boundaries.

That is not the aim. Psychological safety does not mean that nobody feels uncomfortable. Learning, feedback, disagreement and accountability can all involve discomfort. The question is whether challenge takes place within a context of dignity, clarity and relational safety, or whether it is delivered in a way that produces unnecessary fear, humiliation or confusion.

A person who feels attacked, exposed or overwhelmed is unlikely to be in the best state to reflect carefully on their behaviour. They may defend, appease, shut down or counterattack. That does not remove their responsibility. It tells us something important about how responsibility is most likely to be supported.

A trauma-informed manager can be clear about expectations and impact while also being attentive to timing, language, power and the employee’s capacity to participate in the conversation. They can ask what happened without losing sight of what needs to change.

Safety without clarity can create ambiguity. Accountability without safety can produce compliance, concealment or escalation. Good management requires both.

Moving from punitive to restorative does not remove consequences

The school in Stokes’ study shifted from punitive behaviour management towards proactive and restorative approaches. This did not mean ignoring behaviour. It meant responding earlier, understanding what was contributing to escalation and helping students return to learning rather than relying on exclusion as the primary response.

There is an important workplace parallel.

Organisations sometimes move quickly from concern to procedure. A pattern is noticed, an assumption is made and the employee enters a formal process before anyone has had a sufficiently curious conversation about what is going on. Formal procedures are sometimes necessary. They protect employees as well as organisations and should not be abandoned in the name of compassion. But when they are used too early, inconsistently or without attention to context, they can intensify the very behaviour the organisation is trying to address.

A restorative approach still considers impact, responsibility and boundaries. It also asks:

What happened? What contributed to it? Who has been affected? What needs to be repaired? What support or clarity is needed? What must be different next time? The purpose is not to excuse the past. It is to create a more credible route towards future responsibility and changed behaviour.

Trauma-informed practice is also relevant to neuroinclusion

Trauma and neurodivergence are not the same thing, and we should be careful not to conflate them. Being autistic, having ADHD or processing information differently is not in itself evidence of trauma. However, many neurodivergent people have experienced repeated misunderstanding, exclusion, criticism or pressure to suppress natural ways of communicating and regulating. Some have learned that asking for help carries professional risk. Others have had differences interpreted as laziness, resistance, poor attitude, unreliability or a lack of leadership potential.

This is where a trauma-informed lens can strengthen neuroinclusive practice. It encourages us to look beneath the most immediately visible behaviour without assuming that we already understand its meaning. The study describes school staff initially seeing only the “surface-level” presentation rather than what might sit beneath it. The organisation’s response changed when staff developed greater understanding and moved from reactive judgement towards proactive support.

In workplaces, the employee who appears resistant may be overwhelmed by ambiguity. The person who does not respond immediately may need longer to process. The colleague who becomes highly detailed may be trying to create certainty. Someone who withdraws following feedback may be regulating rather than refusing to engage. Again, we should not replace one assumption with another. The aim is not to invent an explanation for someone. It is to create enough safety and curiosity for the employee to contribute to understanding what is happening.

Predictability is a workplace intervention

One of the simplest trauma-informed principles is predictability. At work, predictability does not mean that nothing ever changes. It means that people are given as much clarity as is reasonably possible about what is happening, why it is happening and what will be expected of them. That may involve providing meeting purposes in advance, avoiding unnecessarily alarming calendar invitations, explaining how decisions will be made, giving clear priorities, preparing people for significant change and following through on agreed actions.

It also means recognising the impact of inconsistency. A policy may say one thing while managers do another. One employee may receive a supportive conversation while another is immediately placed into a formal process. Leaders may invite challenge publicly but respond defensively when it arrives. These inconsistencies teach people whether the workplace is genuinely safe, regardless of what appears in the values statement. Predictability supports everyone. It is particularly valuable for people whose cognitive or emotional resources are already carrying additional load.

Voice and choice matter, especially where power is unequal

Workplaces are built around power differences. Managers influence work allocation, progression, performance assessment, reputation and continued employment. Even a well-intentioned conversation does not take place between two people with equal organisational power.

A trauma-informed approach does not pretend that hierarchy has disappeared. It uses authority more thoughtfully. That might mean giving people some choice about how they contribute to a difficult conversation, allowing time to process before responding, explaining available options and inviting them to identify what would help. It also means co-creating solutions where possible rather than assuming that the manager always knows what the person needs. The school study found substantial increases in staff perceptions that they collectively influenced planning, instructional decisions and professional development. This co-creation sat alongside leadership direction rather than replacing it.

That balance matters at work too. Participation does not mean that every decision becomes a vote. It means that people affected by a system have a meaningful opportunity to inform how it operates.

Managers cannot carry this alone

One of the strongest lessons from the study is that practice changed through sustained professional learning, leadership involvement, coaching, reflection and personalised support. The research explicitly argues that professional learning needs to involve more than content delivery and should include trust, relevance, sustained engagement, reflection and individualised support.

This has direct relevance to organisations.

We cannot provide managers with a two-hour session on trauma, neurodiversity or psychological safety and then expect them to navigate complex human situations alone. Nor should we underestimate the emotional labour involved in balancing individual needs, team dynamics, fairness, operational pressure, performance and risk.

Managers need clear parameters, access to specialist advice and reflective spaces in which they can think about what they are noticing, what they may be bringing into the interaction and how to respond appropriately. They also need organisational systems that support rather than undermine the behaviours they are being asked to demonstrate. Without that, trauma-informed practice can become another expectation placed on individual managers while the wider culture remains unchanged.

It must become a whole-system approach

A trauma-informed workplace is not created through a wellbeing app, a set of posters or a small number of compassionate managers. It requires a golden thread across the employee experience: recruitment, onboarding, workload allocation, meetings, change, performance, absence, grievances, investigations, return to work, development and exit.

It asks whether policies are only procedurally correct or whether their implementation also preserves dignity, voice and fairness. It examines whether leaders model curiosity and accountability or revert to blame when pressure increases. It considers whether people can raise difficulties early without losing credibility or professional standing.

The school in the study achieved change by using multiple organisational levers and embedding trauma-informed approaches into everyday practice. Its leadership moved from reactive to proactive responses and supported consistent implementation across the school rather than isolating the work within pastoral provision.

That is perhaps the most important lesson for workplaces. Trauma-informed practice cannot sit solely within wellbeing, HR or occupational health. It needs to shape how work is designed, how authority is exercised and how people respond when something goes wrong.

A more human and more effective workplace

Trauma-informed principles do not turn the workplace into a therapy room. They do not ask managers to become clinicians or organisations to remove reasonable expectations. They ask organisations to become more disciplined about the human conditions under which accountability, learning and performance become possible.

For me, the question is not whether we know which employees have experienced trauma. We may never know, and they should not have to disclose it to be treated with dignity. The more important question is:

Are we creating a workplace that compounds threat and shame, or one that supports regulation, trust, learning and meaningful contribution?

This is not only a wellbeing question. It is a leadership, culture and organisational effectiveness question.

Source

Stokes, H. (2022). Leading Trauma-Informed Education Practice as an Instructional Model for Teaching and Learning. Frontiers in Education, 7, 911328. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2022.911328.