Employers should do more than just talk about mental health

Spring has been a particularly busy time for mental health awareness at work.

Companies have taken every opportunity to trumpet their approach to mental health problems — from highlighting burnout to the impact of global government elections. Many were responding to April’s stress awareness month, which was quickly followed by Mental Health Awareness Week in May.

But an extensive report by a coalition of businesses, including Deloitte and BP, suggests those efforts may have been in vain.

Nearly one-third of the 12,000 people surveyed by the Global Business Collaboration for Better Workplace Mental Health said they would not tell their boss that mental health challenges were the reason they had to take time off. They had cause to be cautious: half the people who did disclose such problems said they had been discriminated against at work as a result.

Even after all those awareness campaigns, only 22 per cent of people thought stigma surrounding mental health in the workplace had decreased since the pandemic. Fewer than half of respondents said their workplace offered useful support when it came to mental health.

What is going wrong? The GBC — which has produced one of the biggest pieces of research on mental health in the workplace — says part of the problem is that we are not talking enough. One of its main recommendations is that senior leaders openly address mental health, which it says makes employees feel more supported. “A test of a culture is that people are able to say, ‘I’m having a bad mental health day today’,” says Poppy Jaman, GBC’s chair.

But talk can be cheap, according to Kevin Teoh, lecturer in organisational psychology at Birkbeck university. Actual changes such as addressing pay disparities, reducing workloads or giving people more control are as, if not more important, than advocacy or awareness raising. “You might have a manager that’s very sympathetic, but if the policies are not being implemented what’s the point?” he says.

If aspects of work — unsatisfying tasks, bullying bosses, unmanageable hours — are the problem, talking up a company commitment and encouraging staff to speak out, then not doing anything, can make a situation worse. “People say they are invited to be vulnerable, but they then don’t get the support that they need . . . Staff can feel they are being gaslit.”

Simply taking action, however, is not always enough — it has to be effective. Simon Wessely, a psychiatry professor at King’s College London, says his research suggests this is not always the case for now-ubiquitous initiatives, such as schemes that give staff access to independent counselling or therapy. “Interventions outside the organisation, such as employee assistance programmes, don’t work well, not least because . . . most people don’t use them anyway.”

Nor, he says, are the attitudes of chief executives or other top bosses particularly important: it is good line managers that really make a difference. “It is not about knowledge — sending middle managers on courses to learn more about mental health does increase their knowledge, but doesn’t seem to translate into improvements for their employees,” Wessely says. But having managers learn new skills such as listening to difficult conversations and practising them through role play does improve things.

Wessely and Teoh’s suggestions involve thinking seriously about what it is like to work somewhere. Taking action such as improving benefits for staff or giving managers the skills to support their teams is more difficult than having leaders open up about mental health or encouraging staff to say they are struggling, or even offering external counselling services.

Individual interventions, Jaman says, are “crucial” but changing “the culture, the workplace environment . . . is what is really beneficial.” In the report, recommendations include targeted training for line managers to have difficult conversations or respecting that staff need to take time off. 

Might we, as Wessely argues, be approaching “peak mental health awareness”? Data that attitudes in the workplace are still discriminatory towards mental health problems suggest we have not.

But if staff are going to speak up about mental health, employers need to be sure they are going to make it worth their while — and that means more than just talking.