Notes from our Nashville session, and why the real leave-prevention work happens months earlier.
By Jennifer Limon, SVP, Strategic Alliances and Solutions, meQ · with Andrew Shatté, Ph.D.
We spent an hour in Nashville at this year's DMEC Annual Conference, talking with a room full of leave and disability professionals about a question most programs never get to ask: what happens before the claim.
A stress-related leave almost never begins with the leave request. It forms over weeks or months of accumulating strain, and the earlier you catch it, the less often a leave claim lands on your desk.
Most leave programs meet strain at the end of its life, once it has become a filed claim. By then the person has spent weeks or months absorbing pressure that no program measured.
Andrew’s work points to why. Beneath how someone handles pressure sits a set of deep assumptions he calls Iceberg Beliefs, the below-the-surface rules people carry about themselves and their work.
Those beliefs shape whether a hard stretch reads as manageable or as a sign that things are coming apart. Strain builds at that level, out of sight, long before it shows up as a leave request.
Compliance manages the leave you already have. It documents, approves, and tracks that leave.
Prevention asks a different question. How do we reduce how much leave there is to manage in the first place? Stress and behavioral-health leave is the fastest-growing disability category, and it often begins as burnout that builds for months. That is why the volume behind that question keeps rising.
The spending is already enormous, and it mostly lands too late to help. Harvard Business Review reports that global corporate spending on wellness is set to top $94.6 billion by 2026, even as mental health needs keep climbing, because most of that spend reaches people after strain has taken hold rather than before.
In meQ’s work the answer is yes, with numbers this community can hold. Employees who improved work-life balance by up to 40% saw roughly 25% fewer disability events, alongside resilience gains above 30%.
This is not about willpower. Resilience is a set of skills people can learn, measure, and strengthen, which is the science Andrew has spent his career validating.
Our data shows the split plainly. Employees low in resilience are twice as likely to take an unplanned absence as the most resilient, and helping people manage workplace stress early is how that gap narrows.
Managers sit closer to early strain than any program does. Research from UKG found people rate their manager’s effect on their mental health as high as their partner’s, and higher than their doctor’s.
That puts managers in a coaching role. The aim is to equip them to build strength and notice pressure early, never to hand them a clinical read on their team.
Managing a leave well will always matter. The argument from Nashville was that the more useful work happens upstream, in the months before the request, while strain is still forming and still reversible.
meQ is software that surfaces the stress patterns building across a workforce and gets people the right support before it turns into a claim, a leave, or your best people quitting. If you want to see what those early signals look like across your workforce, book a demo.
When does a stress-related leave begin?
Rarely on the day it is filed. The strain usually accumulates over weeks or months beforehand, and the earlier it’s caught, the less of it becomes a leave.
Does preventing leave reduce compliance work?
It reduces the volume compliance has to manage. Compliance still handles the leave that occurs; prevention lowers how much of it there is.
Can resilience be built?
Yes. The validation behind meQ’s model treats resilience as a measurable set of skills people can strengthen, not a fixed trait.
