Two reports published this week reveal an issue that should concern business leaders: identifying early signs of decline does not necessarily mean having the capacity to act on them. The gap between observing, deciding, and acting deserves to become a management priority.
By Bianca Schulte Gutiérrez | LuisMontalvo.es
An organization may have performance indicators, employee climate surveys, risk assessments, and specialized people-management departments—and still lack a clear procedure for responding when the first signs of decline appear.
Not necessarily because it is unaware of the problem. Nor because its leaders have no interest in resolving it.
Sometimes, the difficulty lies somewhere less obvious: in the gap between the information an organization receives and its ability to convert that information into operational decisions.
Two recent publications allow us to examine this issue from different perspectives.
On October 14, digital insurer Alan released the results of a workplace mental health study involving 600 employees and 300 Human Resources professionals in Spain.
One day later, Mutua Navarra published its Absenteeism Barometer for the first half of 2026.
The first examines perceptions of psychological strain and organizations’ preventive capacity. The second shows a trend in temporary disability in which the incidence of new leaves of absence decreased while their duration increased.
The studies are not directly comparable, nor do they establish a causal relationship between their findings. Considered together, however, they raise an important question:
Are we improving our ability to recognize problems without making equal progress in our ability to respond to them?
The Difference Between Recognizing a Warning Sign and Having a Response
Alan’s study presents an apparent contradiction.
Sixty-five percent of the Human Resources professionals surveyed consider prevention a high or significant priority. In addition, 70% are confident that their organization can identify early signs of distress.
However, only 43% find it easy to distinguish between a temporary difficulty and a more persistent risk.
And just 20% say that their organization has a defined process for responding when these situations arise.
The gap between these figures deserves attention.
This is not exclusively a matter of training, awareness, or knowledge of the risks. It is about having mechanisms capable of converting an observation into action.
Recognizing that a team is showing signs of exhaustion does not reveal what is causing that exhaustion.
Identifying a loss of motivation does not determine whether it stems from a personal circumstance, a temporary difficulty, an inadequate distribution of work, an unclear responsibility structure, or an accumulation of organizational friction.
Detecting overload does not guarantee that the organization has the capacity to modify the conditions producing it.
Detection provides information. Interpretation provides direction. Intervention requires decisions.
Confusing these three functions can create a sense of control that does not always correspond to the organization’s actual capacity to act.
When Strain Starts to Become Normalized
The employee data adds another dimension to the problem.
According to the same study, 60% of the employees surveyed experience emotional exhaustion frequently or occasionally, 61% feel overwhelmed by their workload, and 57% report having experienced a loss of motivation.
These percentages describe experiences reported by the participants. They do not constitute clinical diagnoses, nor do they allow their causes to be automatically attributed to the organization.
They do, however, justify investigating which conditions may be contributing to their emergence or persistence.
There is a difference between an individual difficulty and a situation that begins to reproduce itself within a work system.
When several people experience similar obstacles, when certain tasks accumulate recurring delays, or when the same unit repeatedly requires extraordinary effort to maintain ordinary results, it is reasonable to ask whether these are isolated incidents or an operational configuration that needs to be reviewed.
The point is not to interpret every expression of fatigue as a business failure.
It is to have sufficient criteria to distinguish the occasional from the persistent and the individual from the organizational.
Without that distinction, prevention risks becoming a series of general responses to problems that may have very different causes.
Fewer Leaves of Absence Do Not Necessarily Mean Less Impact
Mutua Navarra’s Barometer introduces an additional factor.
During the first half of 2026, the incidence of nonoccupational temporary disability among its covered population fell by 6.4% compared with the same period in the previous year, reaching 270.49 cases per 1,000 employees.
At first glance, this trend might appear favorable.
However, the average duration of completed leaves increased by 21.2%, reaching 34.81 days.
In addition, each employee lost an average of 9.04 working days to temporary disability, 4.4% more than one year earlier.
This development requires careful interpretation.
A reduction in the frequency of new leaves of absence does not necessarily imply a proportional reduction in lost working days or in the difficulties organizations face when attempting to maintain operations.
The duration of these cases depends on multiple factors, including the nature and severity of the condition, clinical progress, access to diagnosis and treatment, and recovery conditions.
The report itself identifies healthcare-related difficulties that contribute to extending certain cases.
It would therefore be incorrect to attribute the increase exclusively to shortcomings in workplace prevention.
But it would also be insufficient to analyze the issue solely through the number of recorded absences.
For an organization, the duration of an absence can affect team planning, the distribution of responsibilities, the need for replacements, and the continuity of specific processes.
The business question should not be limited to how many people are absent.
It should also consider how the work system responds to those absences and what happens to the people who keep operations running.
Operational Decline Does Not Always Appear First in the Statistics
At LuisMontalvo.es, we investigate an issue we consider particularly relevant: the possibility of identifying changes in an organization’s day-to-day functioning before certain problems become consolidated in its results.
This perspective forms part of the development of Human Operational Intelligence™ (HOI), an operational observation discipline focused on studying the interaction among people, working conditions, and the performance of organizational systems.
It begins with a simple but methodologically demanding question:
What happens inside an organization during the period in which it is still maintaining its results but begins to require increasing effort to achieve them?
Consider a department that meets its monthly objectives.
Its productivity indicators remain stable. Deliveries are completed, and commitments to customers are maintained.
To achieve this, however, the team must resolve more incidents, repeat tasks, work longer hours, reorganize responsibilities, and continually compensate for difficulties that did not previously exist.
From a perspective focused exclusively on the final result, the department might appear stable.
From an operational perspective, there would be reason to investigate whether the effort required to sustain that result is increasing.
This example does not demonstrate that these conditions will necessarily result in absenteeism, turnover, or economic deterioration.
What it presents is a research hypothesis: certain persistent disruptions in everyday operations may provide relevant information about future risks that traditional indicators do not fully capture.
Turning that hypothesis into a demonstrated predictive capability will require longitudinal data, reproducible measurement criteria, and independent validation.
In the meantime, its immediate value lies in expanding the questions business leaders ask about how their organizations function.
Middle Managers Cannot Become the Organization’s Only Early-Warning System
Alan’s study indicates that only 27% of the Human Resources professionals surveyed say their organization provides team leaders with training on how to address conversations about mental health.
This is a significant gap, but it is also important to avoid an overly simplistic interpretation.
Training middle managers can improve their ability to recognize situations requiring attention, conduct appropriate conversations, and direct people toward specialized resources.
It does not mean that they should diagnose psychological problems or assume clinical responsibilities.
Nor does it mean that they can independently resolve organizational conditions whose modification depends on other levels of decision-making.
A team leader may identify recurring overload while lacking the authority to modify staffing levels, objectives, resource allocation, or established priorities.
They may recognize that certain tasks generate continuous conflict without having the ability to redesign the process.
Under these circumstances, transferring all preventive responsibility to middle management may add pressure precisely to one of the positions most exposed to the organization’s internal contradictions.
Prevention requires prepared people, but it also requires decision-making structures capable of responding to the information those people provide.
An early-warning system without a response pathway may ultimately become another mechanism through which problems accumulate.
From Observation to Intervention: A Leadership Responsibility
The challenge is not to multiply indicators indefinitely.
It is to determine which indicators provide useful information, how they should be interpreted, and which decisions they justify.
To do so, an organization must answer at least five questions:
- What signal are we observing, and how can we verify that it is not a temporary variation?
- Which factors might explain its emergence, and which of them can we verify?
- Who has the responsibility and authority to intervene in the identified conditions?
- What action is proportionate to the observed risk, and what consequences might it have?
- How will we subsequently determine whether the intervention produced a genuine improvement?
The final question is especially important.
A measure may be implemented without being effective.
An improvement may occur after an intervention without having been caused by it.
And one indicator may improve while other dimensions of organizational functioning deteriorate.
For this reason, moving toward verifiable prevention requires establishing baselines, observing change over time, and—where methodologically possible—comparing results with equivalent situations.
It is not enough to state that action has been taken.
It is necessary to determine what changed, by how much, for how long, and with what degree of confidence the change can be related to the action taken.
An Issue That Also Concerns Business Associations
This debate extends beyond the boundaries of any individual company.
Business and industry associations can play an important role in building knowledge about the factors that hinder prevention.
Not all sectors operate under the same conditions.
Exposure to shift work, pressure within healthcare settings, seasonality, dependence on logistics chains, the intensity of customer-facing work, and the rigidity of certain processes create very different operational contexts.
For this reason, general comparisons may be insufficient to explain what is happening within a specific economic activity.
Business associations have an opportunity to promote sector-specific studies capable of distinguishing shared trends, specific conditions, and practices whose effectiveness can be evaluated.
They can also encourage cooperation among companies, occupational risk-prevention services, healthcare organizations, researchers, and public authorities.
The objective should not be limited to determining how much absenteeism a sector records. It should also seek to better understand which modifiable factors affect how that sector functions and which interventions produce sustainable results.
This must always be done with respect for confidentiality, personal data protection, and the limitations of each study.
The Real Question Is Not Whether We Are Detecting More, but Whether We Are Learning to Act More Effectively
The publications from Alan and Mutua Navarra describe different realities, but they help identify a shared issue.
The existence of information does not guarantee that an organization has the capacity to use it.
Prevention cannot be reduced to a statement of priorities, an isolated training initiative, or the implementation of measures whose effectiveness is never assessed.
It requires observation, interpretation, clearly defined responsibilities, and subsequent evaluation.
For boards of directors and executive leadership teams, this opens an area of inquiry that extends beyond Human Resources departments.
What information actually reaches decision-making bodies?
How much time passes between the appearance of a relevant signal and the adoption of a measure?
What obstacles prevent action?
And what evidence shows whether a decision corrected the problem it was intended to resolve?
These questions do not replace legal occupational risk-prevention obligations, healthcare, or established risk-assessment instruments.
They complement them from the perspective of management and organizational learning.
The next advance in workplace prevention may not depend solely on identifying more warning signs.
It will also depend on building organizations capable of understanding them, making timely decisions, and verifying the consequences of those decisions.
An organization’s maturity is demonstrated not only by its ability to recognize that something is beginning to fail, but by its capacity to determine why, intervene with sound judgment, and verify what has changed.
Sources and References
Alan Spain (October 14, 2026). Press release on the workplace mental health study conducted among 600 employees and 300 Human Resources professionals in Spain. Published by Europa Press in its press release section.
https://www.europapress.es/comunicados/salud-0910/noticia-comunicado-marta-martin-psicologa-tercio-responsables-rrhh-forma-salud-mental-20261014140641.html
Mutua Navarra (October 15, 2026). Fewer Leaves of Absence, but Longer Durations. Absenteeism Barometer for the first half of 2026.
https://www.mutuanavarra.es/2026/10/15/menos-bajas-pero-mas-largas
Methodological note: Alan’s findings come from a survey and describe reported perceptions and experiences. Mutua Navarra’s data corresponds to its covered population and should not be automatically extrapolated to Spain as a whole. The combined reading of the two studies is an editorial interpretation, not evidence of causality.