Mental Health in the Workplace: What Employers Are Getting Right and Wrong

The scale of the problem

The Thriving at Work review found that poor mental health costs UK employers between £33bn and £42bn per year in absenteeism, presenteeism (working at reduced effectiveness) and staff turnover. The majority of the cost comes from presenteeism rather than sick days. One in six workers experiences a common mental health problem — anxiety, depression or stress-related conditions — in any given week.

What the evidence says works

The most robust evidence is for interventions at the work design level: giving employees more autonomy and control over their work, ensuring manageable workloads, providing clear job requirements, and training line managers to have effective conversations about mental health. These primary prevention approaches address root causes.

What has less evidence

Many employers invest heavily in employee assistance programmes, wellbeing apps and resilience training. These are not worthless, but the evidence for their impact on population-level mental health outcomes is more limited. Critics argue that resilience training in particular places the burden of coping on individuals rather than addressing systemic causes.

Measuring it properly

Workplace wellbeing surveys are widely used but often poorly designed and selectively reported. Robust measurement requires anonymous surveys with high response rates, tracked longitudinally against objective measures like absence rates and retention, not just satisfaction scores.