About Workplace Mental Health
The phrase is everywhere now. It sits in board papers, recruitment ads, and wellbeing strategies. “We’re building a mentally healthy workplace.” It has become one of those terms that everyone uses and few people stop to define.
So let me ask the awkward question. What does it actually mean? How would you know one if you walked into it? And what does good look like, set against poor?
Awareness is not the same as action
Start with where most organisations put their effort: awareness.
There is no shortage of it. The calendar is full of mental health awareness days, weeks, and months. Posters go up. Someone shares their story. The intranet turns a tasteful shade of green for a fortnight. All of it is well meant, and none of it is wrong.
But awareness on its own is a strange thing to be proud of. Raising the profile of a problem without putting anything in place to address it is like opening up a wound, making it visible, and then walking away. You can see it now. That does not mean it is healing.
The test of a mentally healthy workplace is not how loudly it talks about mental health one week a year. It is what happens in the other fifty-one.
A working definition
Here is a definition worth holding organisations to.
A mentally healthy workplace is one where the way work is designed, managed, and led actively protects people’s psychological health, supports those who are struggling, and does not, through its own structures, make people unwell.
Three parts to that, and the order matters.
Prevention first. The biggest driver of poor mental health at work is often the work itself: unmanageable demands, low control, poor change management, weak support, unclear roles, bad relationships. These are not soft issues. They are recognised psychosocial risks, and they are the focus of ISO 45003, the global standard for managing psychological health and safety at work. A healthy workplace treats them like any other hazard. It looks for them, assesses them, and designs them out where it can.
Support second. Even in a well-run organisation, people will go through hard times, at work and outside it. A healthy workplace makes it safe to say so, and means it. Managers know how to have the conversation. Help is real and reachable, not a phone number on a poster.
No self-harm by design, third. This is the part organisations skip. Some workplaces actively manufacture the distress they then offer counselling for. If your culture rewards exhaustion, punishes honesty, and tolerates poor management, no amount of resilience training will fix it. You cannot wellbeing your way out of a workplace that is making people ill.
What good and poor actually look like
Strip away the language and the difference becomes clear.
In a poor workplace, mental health is an event. It is a campaign, a webinar, a lanyard. Responsibility sits with the individual: be more resilient, download the app, use the helpline. When someone struggles, the question is what is wrong with them. Data, if it is collected at all, is sickness absence after the fact.
In a good workplace, mental health is built into how work runs. Responsibility sits with the organisation and its leaders, not only the individual. When someone struggles, the question is also what is happening around them, and what we can change. The organisation measures the things that predict harm, not just the harm itself, and it acts on what it finds.
The cleanest way to tell the two apart is to ask a manager a simple question: what have you changed about how work is done as a result of what you learned about your team’s wellbeing? In a poor workplace, the honest answer is nothing. In a good one, they can point to something specific.
Where this leaves leaders
None of this means awareness campaigns should stop. Visibility matters, and reducing stigma is real progress. The point is that awareness is the start of the work, not the whole of it.
If your organisation has done the awareness part well, the question now is harder and more useful. Have you looked honestly at how work is designed and managed? Do your managers have the skills and the permission to act? Can you point to something that is genuinely different because of what you say you believe?
That is the line between a workplace that talks about mental health and one that is actually healthy. The first is easy. The second is the job.
About Peter Kelly and Being Real
Peter J Kelly is an occupational psychologist with more than 20 years at the Health and Safety Executive shaping national policy on workplace mental health. He was a member of the ISO 45003 drafting panel, the world’s first international standard for psychological health and safety at work. Being Real is his specialist consultancy, helping organisations move from policy to practice.
If you would like to talk about what real support looks like in your organisation, contact Peter at being-real.co.uk