Clinically reviewed by Chris Mosunic, PhD, RD, MBA, Chief Clinical Officer, Calm
Benefits consultants might feel like tightrope walkers navigating a high-risk balancing act. On one hand, they’re tasked with making meaningful improvements in employee well‑being; on the other, reducing employer costs. To do more with less, they’re reevaluating vendor relationships, searching for operational efficiencies, and requiring every solution to prove its value with measurable impact.
Amid these pressures, one key strategy shouldn’t be overlooked: emotional awareness. Emotional awareness is the initial step in building emotional intelligence (EQ) but also impactful in its own right.
In fact, cultivating emotional awareness can improve employee well-being, support efficient teamwork, and help organizations combat spiraling costs. In this way, emotional awareness isn’t merely a soft skill; it’s a strategic capability that every consultant, health plan, and employer should prioritize and endeavor to foster throughout the workforce.
What is emotional awareness?
Emotional awareness is the ability to recognize, understand, and describe what you’re feeling and what others might be feeling, too. According to the Levels of Awareness Scale (LEAS), the lowest level of emotional awareness is becoming aware of bodily sensations associated with an emotion, e.g., feeling your jaw tighten when angry or stomach butterflies when nervous.
Further up on the scale is the ability to identify and name a single emotion, e.g., feeling sadness or fear. The highest level of the scale is a sophisticated awareness of nuanced emotions, e.g., feeling happy but anxious or sad but hopeful.
People with low emotional awareness may miss important signals about how they and others are feeling in situations. This gap in understanding can lead to a wide range of problems, including miscommunication, stress, and lower productivity.
On the flip side, employees with strong emotional awareness are better able to recognize, respond to, and manage emotions. This skill facilitates decision-making and helps create a workplace that’s more harmonious, productive, and effective.
Emotional awareness can help improve employee mental health
Building a culture of emotional awareness can also have a positive impact on workforce mental health. Here are three ways:
- Emotional awareness acts as a pause button in stressful situations
When people are aware of how they’re feeling, they’re more likely to consciously choose appropriate and constructive ways to respond to stressors in the moment. A conscious reaction can also help prevent stress from escalating to anxiety, burnout, or depression.
2. Emotional awareness helps people proactively seek mental health support
Research suggests that the ability to identify and articulate emotions is key to proactively seeking help. A person with emotional awareness is more likely to notice when they’re developing symptoms of anxiety or depression and take action to support their needs, e.g., practice mindfulness or seek therapy.
3. Emotional awareness acts like a mental compass
A study of faculty members found that those faculty members who can identify and reflect on their emotions are better able to regulate stress, accept negative emotions, and move forward productively, reducing the risk of psychological problems and possibly strengthening their mental health.
In short, emotional awareness allows people to better understand their negative emotions and regulate them more effectively so they don’t become overwhelmed. By contrast, people with low emotional awareness have a higher risk of anxiety, depression, and behavioral issues.
Emotional awareness can improve team dynamics and productivity
By helping people understand each other better, emotional awareness can also support better teamwork and productivity, which in turn can reduce work-related stress.
- Emotional awareness helps prevent miscommunication
Miscommunication is a costly source of friction in the workplace: 70% of employees report that miscommunication directly leads to lost productivity.
But emotional awareness can help prevent miscommunication. According to psychologist and author Dr. Paul Ekman, a pioneer in the field, emotions often leak out through facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language. These micro expressions can reveal frustration, anger, or discomfort before words do.
When employees are emotionally aware, they can recognize these cues in themselves and others. This awareness helps them respond thoughtfully rather than let miscommunication and misunderstandings grow. - Emotional awareness helps prevent workplace conflict and costly attrition
When people are attuned to their own and others’ emotions, they can respond calmly in difficult situations and defuse tension before it escalates. For example, emotionally aware managers and leaders can recognize their anger or frustration and stop themselves from lashing out at peers or team members.
Considering nearly 50% of employees report leaving a job due to unresolved workplace conflict, organizations can help reduce costly turnover by fostering a culture of emotional awareness.
Emotional awareness belongs in organizations’ cost-control strategies
By strengthening mental health, reducing conflict, and improving workplace dynamics and efficiency, emotional awareness at scale can help organizations control health-related costs and costs tied to burnout, lost productivity, and attrition.
- Cost of lost productivity due to absenteeism: In the US, employees with fair or poor mental health have four times the number of unplanned absences per year (about 12 days), which costs the economy an estimated $47.6 billion annually in lost productivity.
- Cost of lost productivity due to depression and anxiety: An estimated 12 billion working days are lost globally every year to depression and anxiety, at a cost of $1 trillion per year in lost productivity.
- Cost of burnout: A 2025 study estimates that burnout costs range from $4,000 (hourly non-manager) to $21,000 (executive) per employee per year, which translates to ~$5 million in annual losses due to reduced productivity, absenteeism, turnover, and healthcare expenses.
- Cost of attrition: Replacing an employee is estimated to cost up to two times the employee’s annual salary.
- Higher healthcare costs due to mental health conditions: A large cohort study found that members with a mental health challenge had a 64% mean increase in claims cost per member compared to those without a mental health challenge. By contrast, every $1 spent to proactively support mental health can save employers $2 to $4 in healthcare costs.
An urgent need for workforce emotional awareness, but gaining it isn’t easy
The state of employee well-being suggests that organizations can’t afford to ignore emotional awareness any longer. Nearly half of employees in the US and Canada report experiencing high stress on a daily basis, for example. Nearly one-third of US employees report feeling burned out often or always, and one in four employees say they’ve considered quitting their jobs due to mental health challenges.
But becoming emotionally aware isn’t easy. In fact, it’s against our nature, according to psychologist and author Dr. Paul Ekman, a pioneer in the field. To build emotional awareness, he recommends people take the following steps:
- Practice exercises that build awareness of physical changes in the body when an emotion arises
- Keep a log of emotional episodes to help identify patterns and anticipate triggers
- Learn to identify and respond to others’ facial expressions and behaviors
- Practice mindfulness meditation, which helps us focus on automatic processes, including emotion-driven impulses
Helping employer clients cultivate workforce emotional awareness: 3 key product criteria
The question is how you can help employer clients operationalize these steps so that employees across the organization can build emotional awareness.
As organizations look for ways to streamline benefits, simplify the employee experience, and increase utilization, recommending they deploy one more point solution isn’t the answer.
Instead, look for tools that meet three key criteria:
- Proactively engage employees in their mental health and keep them coming back
- Integrate with other employer benefits to simplify the employee experience
Incorporate tools to help employee members build emotional awareness and track their emotions
Calm Health meets all 3 key criteria
A digital mental wellness product, Calm Health proactively engages employees in their mental health, integrates with employer-sponsored benefits and programs, and incorporates tools to help employees build emotional awareness.
- Mental health screening proactively engages employee members
Calm Health prompts employee members to complete a brief mental health screening* that employees can use anytime to get additional insight into their depression and anxiety symptoms.
The screening uses the Patient Health Questionnaire 9 (PHQ-9), a screening for depression symptoms, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7), a screening for anxiety symptoms. After a questionnaire is completed, Calm recommends a tailored plan of clinical programming, mindfulness content, or external resources aligned to the user’s screening results.
(*This screening is not intended to diagnose depression or anxiety, nor is it a substitute for care by a physician or other healthcare provider. It is available only to US residents age 13 or older.) - Integrates with other employer-sponsored benefits
By offering products that work together in a single, integrated ecosystem, organizations can make it easier for employees to find and use the mental health programs they need while reducing administrative complexity.
Calm Health not only links to an organization’s EAP and other benefits but also guides employees to the resources that are right for their needs based on their mental health screening results, self‑reported goals, and topics of interest. - Incorporates emotional awareness tools
Drawing on top emotional researchers’ work, Calm Health’s Emotions Check-Ins helps employees regularly practice building emotional awareness. Through guided prompts, employees can pause during the day to recognize and label their emotions.
Users select the emotion that most closely matches their current emotional state, specify the intensity of the emotion, and provide additional information that might offer insight into why they feel the way they do.
Based on these inputs, Calm Health will offer recommendations for evidence-based programs and mindfulness tools—e.g., mindfulness meditations, breathing exercises, music, and wisdom—to help employees become more present and aware of automatic processes in their bodies, combat stress, and build resilience.
Users can see their history of emotions check-ins, including their emotion, sub-emotion, and level of intensity.
Emotional awareness isn’t a nice‑to‑have; it’s a strategic lever for improving well‑being, strengthening teams, and controlling costs in an increasingly strained workplace environment. As consultants help employers operationalize emotional awareness, they should look past point solutions and toward programs such as Calm Health that engage employees, integrate seamlessly with existing benefits, and support employees in building emotional awareness as a regular practice.
