Case study: North Yorkshire Police Force
EVIDENCE
An opportunity to test the research in one of the most demanding working environments, where pressure isn't theoretical; it's part of the job.
Background
The North Yorkshire Police Force was facing a very practical problem: high levels of sickness absence among its officers. Challenge of Change was invited to help, using their resilience programme to explore whether changing the way people respond to pressure could have a meaningful impact.
Stress can contribute to absence in two ways: by affecting our physical health and by making it harder to return to work even when we are physically able to. Building resilience can help address both, supporting individual wellbeing as well as organisational performance.
The study
To test whether Challenge of Change could make a real difference, 147 North Yorkshire Police officers took part in a controlled study. The officers were carefully matched on factors including age, rank and experience, before being randomly divided into two groups. One group of 75 received Challenge of Change training, while the other 72 received more conventional stress management training.
The participants didn't know they were receiving different programmes, and both groups began with similar levels of sickness absence. Their absence was then monitored as part of the study, allowing researchers to compare what happened following the training.
The results
The results were hard to ignore.
Over the following 11 months, officers who received Challenge of Change averaged 5.39 days of sickness absence, compared with 10.96 days among those who received conventional stress management training.
Both groups experienced the same seasonal effect of higher absence during the winter months. Yet by the end of the study, average sickness absence in the Challenge of Change group was less than half that of the control group.
It was a powerful real-world result, suggesting that changing how people respond to pressure could have an impact that went well beyond how they felt.
