About Workplace Mental Health
There is a conversation I have with organisations more often than any other, and it almost always happens near the end of the meeting. Everyone agrees that psychological risk matters. It is then placed at the end of the budget, to be picked up when there is room. Next financial year, perhaps. The year after, if things are tight.
Here is the problem with that. When you have a risk, you have a risk there and then. The budget cycle does not change the exposure. Deferring the spend does not defer the hazard. The only thing that changes is how long your people carry it before anybody does anything about it.
The risk does not wait for the financial year
Nobody defers a faulty machine guard to the next quarter. Nobody looks at a failed pressure test and schedules the repair for when the capital budget refreshes. We understand instinctively that a physical hazard is live from the moment it exists, and that the cost of leaving it is not a cost we control.
Psychosocial risk is treated differently, and there is no good reason for it. Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to the health and safety of employees. Health is in that sentence, and psychological health is health. The duty attaches to the hazard, not to the accounting period.
The scale is not marginal either. In 2024/25 the Health and Safety Executive recorded 964,000 workers suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety, and an estimated 22.1 million working days lost to it. That is now around half of all work-related ill health in Great Britain. If any physical hazard produced numbers on that scale, it would not be sitting at the bottom of anyone’s spending list.
It is already showing up in your accident data
This is the part that tends to change the conversation, so I want to put it plainly. Psychosocial risk is not only a health problem sitting alongside your safety performance. It is very probably intimately involved in some of the accidents you are already investigating.
The research on this is settled enough to act on. A 2011 meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology by Nahrgang, Morgeson and Hofmann, covering decades of studies across industries, found that job demands drive burnout and that burnout is associated with more accidents and injuries, while job resources such as autonomy, supportive supervision and a genuine safety climate drive engagement and better safety compliance. A later systematic review of psychosocial factors in high-risk industries, by Derdowski and Mathisen in Safety Science in 2023, reached the same place from a different direction.
The mechanism is not mysterious. Fatigue narrows attention. Chronic pressure shortens the time people spend on the step that feels optional. Fear of being blamed suppresses the near-miss report that would have told you about the hazard three months before it hurt somebody. Poor role clarity produces the handover where each person assumed the other had done the check.
So when an investigation lands on “human error” and stops there, it has recorded a symptom and missed the hazard. The error is real. The question is what in the design and management of the work made that error likely, and whether the same conditions are still in place this morning.
What treating it like any other risk actually means
When I say psychosocial risk should be treated like any other risk, I am not asking for more sympathy. I am asking for the same machinery you already own to be pointed at it.
- Identify the hazard, not the mood. The hazards live in how work is designed, organised and managed. The HSE Management Standards give you the six areas to look at: demands, control, support, relationships, role and change. A survey score is not a hazard. “Shift patterns give recovery time of under eleven hours on rotation” is a hazard.
- Assess who is exposed and how badly. Some groups carry far more of it than the average. Lone workers, night shifts, people handling distressed customers, people in roles that were restructured twice in two years.
- Control at source first. Apply the same hierarchy you apply everywhere else. Change the work, then the systems around the work, then support the individual. An employee assistance programme and a mental health first aider sit at the personal protective equipment end of that hierarchy. They are worth having. They are not a control for the hazard itself.
- Record it, monitor it, review it. Owner, date, and evidence of what changed. If the control cannot be checked, it is not a control.
Do that and psychosocial risk stops being a special case. It appears on the risk register with everything else. It gets a number, a name against it and a review date, and it gets reported to the board in the language the board already uses.
The budget argument, answered honestly
I am not going to promise a return on investment figure, because the honest answer is that the numbers vary enormously by sector and most of the published ones are marketing. What I will say is narrower and harder to argue with.
You are already paying for this. The cost is simply not landing on a line that says psychosocial risk. It is landing in absence cover, in agency spend, in overtime to cover the gap, in turnover and rehiring, in error and rework, and in the incident that you will investigate in the autumn. Twenty two point one million working days is not a projection. It is what has already been paid.
So the choice is not between spending and not spending. It is between spending deliberately on something you have assessed, and absorbing the cost of something you have not.
You do not get to choose when the risk starts. You only get to choose when you start managing it. If psychological risk is sitting at the end of your budget, it is worth asking what it is doing to your numbers while it waits.
Frequently asked questions
Is psychosocial risk assessment a legal requirement in the UK?
In substance, yes. There is no separate mental health at work statute, and there does not need to be one. Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires employers to assess the risks to the health and safety of their employees, and psychological health is health. The HSE Management Standards set out what the regulator expects that assessment to cover.
Where does ISO 45003 fit if it is not law?
ISO 45003, the global standard for psychological health and safety at work, is voluntary rather than legislation. Its value is that it is the clearest available description of what managing psychosocial risk involves in practice, and it maps onto an existing ISO 45001 management system, so most organisations with one are closer to it than they think.
About the author
Peter J Kelly is an occupational psychologist and the founder of Being Real. He spent more than twenty years at the Health and Safety Executive shaping national policy on workplace mental health, sat on the panel that drafted ISO 45003, and was expert convenor for BS 30480. Being Real supports organisations with ISO 45003 gap analysis and certification, BS 30480 implementation, psychosocial risk assessment, strategic advisory and training.
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