About Workplace Mental Health
Most organisations do not lack good intentions on mental health. What they lack is a workplace mental health strategy that ties their efforts together. The result is a scatter of activity: an awareness day here, an app there, a mental health first aider over there, with no clear logic connecting them and no honest way of knowing whether any of it is working. A real workplace mental health strategy fixes that. After a quarter of a century at the Health and Safety Executive and a seat on the panel that drafted ISO 45003, the global standard for psychological health and safety at work, I have seen what separates a strategy that changes things from a document that sits on a shelf.
Why you need a strategy, not a collection of activities
The case for getting this right is not soft. The Health and Safety Executive’s latest figures, for 2024/25, show 964,000 workers suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety, with 22.1 million working days lost. Deloitte puts the annual cost of poor mental health to UK employers at around £51 billion, much of it from people who keep turning up but cannot perform. Against numbers like these, a pile of disconnected initiatives is not enough. A workplace mental health strategy gives you a single, coherent picture: what you are trying to achieve, why, in what order, and how you will know it is working. Without that, spending tends to flow to whatever is most visible rather than whatever does most good.
Start with the three jobs a strategy has to do
A good workplace mental health strategy does three things, and the order matters. The first is to prevent harm: to find and reduce the features of work that damage people’s mental health in the first place. The second is to protect and promote wellbeing: to build the conditions in which people can do well. The third is to support those in need: to make sure that when someone struggles, help is real and reachable. These are the three pillars the World Health Organization sets out, and they are the backbone of how I advise organisations to think. Most strategies are heavy on the third job and almost silent on the first. That is precisely the wrong way round.
Build it on evidence, not assumptions
You cannot build a strategy on a hunch about how people are feeling. Start with what you already know: sickness absence, turnover, exit interviews and staff survey results, and then go and ask people directly. A stress risk assessment, working through the recognised causes of work-related stress such as demands, control, support, relationships, role and change, will tell you where the real pressure sits. The point is to design your strategy around your actual risks, not around whatever happens to be fashionable. This is also the foundation for aligning with ISO 45003; you can see how we approach that on our ISO 45003 gap analysis page.
Put prevention first
Here is where the evidence is unambiguous and most strategies go wrong. Deloitte’s research shows an average return of around £4.70 for every pound invested in workplace mental health, but the highest returns, around £6.30 for every pound, come from universal measures such as culture change and education, not from reactive support after someone is already unwell. In plain terms, it pays more to stop people being harmed than to treat the harm later. Yet prevention is the part organisations skip, because it means looking honestly at workload, management quality and how change is handled. A strategy that does not touch the design of work is treating symptoms.
Make it measurable and owned
A strategy with no owner and no measures is a wish list. Someone senior has to be accountable for it, because many of the levers, resourcing, targets, how restructures are run, sit above the level of any individual manager. And you have to measure the things that predict harm, not just the harm itself; leading indicators like workload and support, not only the lagging indicator of absence. The test I put to leaders is simple: a year from now, can you point to something specific about how work is done that is different because of your strategy? If the honest answer is nothing, you have a communications plan, not a strategy.
Where ISO 45003 and BS 30480 fit
A workplace mental health strategy does not exist in a vacuum. For most organisations it should align with ISO 45003, which provides the framework for managing psychosocial risk. For those in higher-risk sectors, it should also take account of BS 30480, the British Standard for suicide prevention in the workplace. These standards are not extra burdens bolted on top of a strategy; they are the structure that makes a strategy credible and consistent. Our strategic advisory work is built around exactly this, and our post on what real interventions look like shows the difference in practice.
Workplace mental health strategy frequently asked questions
What should a workplace mental health strategy include?
At a minimum it should set out your priorities across the three jobs of preventing harm, promoting wellbeing and supporting those in need; the evidence base behind those priorities; clear ownership and accountability; the actions you will take; and the measures by which you will judge progress. The strongest strategies lead with prevention and are honest about the design of work.
How do you measure whether a workplace mental health strategy is working?
Look at leading indicators as well as lagging ones. Track the work-related causes of stress through regular assessment and staff feedback, not just sickness absence after the fact. And apply the simplest test of all: can you name specific changes to how work is done that resulted from the strategy?
A practical next step
If your organisation has plenty of mental health activity but no strategy holding it together, that is a common and very fixable position to be in. A clear-eyed look at your risks and a strategy built on prevention will get you further than another awareness campaign. If you would like help shaping yours, get in touch at being-real.co.uk.
About Peter Kelly and Being Real
Peter Kelly is an organisational psychologist with a quarter of a century at the Health and Safety Executive, where he shaped national policy on work-related stress and helped build the UK’s management standards approach. He sat on the drafting panel for ISO 45003, the global standard for psychological health and safety at work. Being Real helps organisations move from policy to practice on workplace mental health. To talk to Peter, visit being-real.co.uk.