Insights, articles and updates on workplace mental health
The HSE Management Standards are, in my view, still the most practical framework any UK employer has for tackling work-related stress at its source. I say that with a particular interest, because I spent more than twenty years at the Health and Safety Executive, and I was part of the team that developed the management […]
An ISO 45003 gap analysis is the most useful first step any organisation can take towards managing psychological health and safety properly. It is a structured comparison of what you do now against ISO 45003, the global standard for psychological health and safety at work, and it gives you an honest map of where you […]
Psychological safety at work is one of those phrases that gets used a great deal and understood far less. People hear it and assume it means being nice, avoiding conflict, or keeping everyone comfortable. It means almost the opposite. Psychological safety is the shared belief that you can speak up, admit a mistake, ask a […]
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 […]
Ask most managers whether they have done a risk assessment for the obvious physical hazards, the trailing cables, the heavy lifting, the working at height, and they will say yes. Ask them whether they have done a stress risk assessment, and you often get a blank look. Yet work-related stress is now the single largest […]
This month a letter in The BMJ, the British Medical Journal, called for work-related suicide to be formally recognised and recorded in the UK. It was led by Professor Sarah Waters at the University of Leeds, and I was one of more than 30 signatories from across academia, industry and the charity sector. I signed […]
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 […]
If you lead an organisation in 2026, you have almost certainly heard the term ISO 45003. It turns up in board papers, tender documents and wellbeing strategies, often without anyone pausing to explain what it is. So let me do that plainly. ISO 45003, the global standard for psychological health and safety at work, sets […]
The appeal of the checklist Checklists are satisfying. They are concrete. They are auditable. They convert complex and ambiguous territory into a set of discrete, completable actions. Policy in place? Tick. EAP in place? Tick. Mental health first aiders trained? Tick. Manager awareness session delivered? Tick. This is not nothing. Having a policy matters. Having […]
The summer effect is real Most people feel better in summer. Energy tends to be higher, mood tends to be lighter, and the experience of work, while unchanged in most of its fundamentals, tends to feel more manageable. The reverse pattern in winter is equally well-documented. Lower energy, increased difficulty concentrating, a heavier quality to […]
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