Stress Behaviour Index (SBI): an anonymous, employee-wide survey that scores stress-response behaviour against a structured Fight / Flight / Freeze / Fawn / Healthy framework, rolled up into a department-level index leadership can actually act on.
Behaviour, not sentiment
"How satisfied are you at work?" is a sentiment question. It's easy to answer, easy to misrepresent, and easy for someone having a genuinely fine week to answer well while quietly burning out underneath it.
SBI asks a different kind of question: how do you actually respond when things go wrong, deadlines loom, or feedback stings? The answers map onto a real, established behavioural pattern: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn, or a Healthy response, the same underlying framework used to describe stress response in a clinical setting, adapted for the workplace.
The patterns behind the number
Underneath the headline index, Countered tracks seven specific behavioural patterns. A few examples:
Each pattern has a real cost attached to it: delayed decisions, bottlenecked approvals, quiet overcommitment that eventually breaks. That's exactly what feeds into the financial-impact figure alongside the index itself.
Built to be anonymous, not just described that way
The moment people think their honesty could be used against them, the data stops being honest. So the only identifying field SBI ever asks is which department someone works in. No name, no email, nothing that traces back to a person, at the schema level, not just as a policy. Aggregate, department-level results roll up to leadership. Individual answers never do.
How it's different from the leadership side
SBI is the employee-facing half of a two-sided measurement. The leadership-facing half, how ready the organisation is to execute from leadership's own perspective, is the Execution Readiness Score. Run together, they show you where leadership's read of the organisation and what employees are actually experiencing agree, and where they quietly don't.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Stress Behaviour Index anonymous?
Yes. It asks one identifying field, department, and nothing else. No name or email is ever linked to a response, and individual answers are never shown to leadership, only aggregate, department-level results.
How is this different from an engagement or wellbeing survey?
Most wellbeing surveys ask how someone feels. The Stress Behaviour Index asks how someone actually behaves under pressure, whether they control, avoid, react, or overaccommodate, using a structured behavioural framework rather than a self-reported mood scale.
How long does it take to complete?
Around ten minutes. It's sent to each employee as a one-time, verified personal link, and asks only which department they work in beyond the behavioural questions themselves.
See your own number
The calculator gives you a conservative estimate in under two minutes. The real Stress Behaviour Index comes from running the actual assessment with your team.
Estimate your risk