Mental health in the workplace is crucial for productivity and effectiveness. Supporting people in their struggles starts at the top.

Eight out of ten employees globally feel at risk of burnout in 2024.

This alarming insight is contained in Mercer’s 2024 Global Talent Trends report, which reflects insights from 845 C-Suite executives, 1920 HR leaders, 9449 employees and 84 investors from across 17 geographies and 16 industries.

The report points out that workforce health is a major business challenge. Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) account for 74% of worldwide deaths and stress-related illnesses are on the rise. In addition to the obvious impact on staffing levels and effectiveness, unhappiness in the workplace has financial implications. McKinsey research, published in September 2023, found that employee disengagement and attrition could cost a median-size S&P 500 company between $228 million and $355 million a year in lost productivity.

The seriousness with which business views these challenges is reflected in the global spend on wellness interventions: companies around the world spent $61.2 billion on wellness interventions in 2021, and that amount is projected to grow to $94.6 billion in 2026.

It’s unclear though whether these interventions are effective. Writing in the Guardian, André Spicer, professor of organisational behaviour at the Bayes Business School at City, University of London, quotes an Oxford University study of the impact of a wide range of workplace wellbeing interventions (including stress management and mindfulness) which found that almost none of these interventions had any statistically significant impact on worker wellbeing or job satisfaction.

Spicer writes: “It turns out the most effective way to improve employee mental health is by reducing stress, rather than adding new ways to cope with it”. That’s echoed by two Deloitte experts, Jen Fisher and Colleen Bordeaux, who say that the problem with wellness programmes is that they often “shift the burden of action on individual employees by providing them a constellation of difficult-to-access perks and programmes”.

Management initiatives (like wellness programmes) that are imposed from above do something on top of shifting the burden of action on to individual employees: they often don’t consider the extra dimensions of stress experienced by traditionally excluded individuals and/or groups.

When mental health and DE&I intersect

As diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) consultancy The Kaleidoscope Group points out, members of marginalised groups whose identity is socially stigmatised (due to cultural identity, race, ethnicity, or sexuality) often face mental health challenges over and above those experienced by members of privileged groups. Since the workplace is a reflection of the society around it, the stressors faced by minority groups are inevitably present at work – for example a member of the LGBTQ+ community might not feel safe being openly “out” at work, or might be at the receiving end of microaggressions or unconscious bias. Or someone who is neurodivergent might be struggling silently with workplace expectations of what is considered appropriate behaviour.

According to digital mental health provider Uprise Health:

• A black adult in the United States is 20% more likely to experience a serious mental health concern than a white adult.

• 27% percent of women experienced increased mental health struggles during the Covid-19 pandemic, compared with 10% of men.

• People with low incomes are up to three times more likely to experience depression and anxiety.

Access to mental health care is equally fraught. A 2015 study in the United States found that of the adults who accessed mental health services over the course of a year, 16.6% were white, 15.6% were American Indian or Alaska Native, 8.6% were black, 7.3% were Hispanic and 4.9% were Asian.

Uprise Health outlines some possible reasons for this – and it’s striking that many of these issues would also affect people’s work performance, the ways in which they show up in the office and their capacity to deal with any stresses that the workplace itself imposes:

• erratic access to transportation or lack of (or no) childcare

• fear of racism and discrimination

• different cultural perceptions about mental health

• hesitation about taking time off work

• language barriers

A toxic brew: disability, prejudice and modern workplace trends

In addition to hidden stresses associated with being a member of a minority group, employees might be struggling with mental illness, the Kaleidoscope Group says. These staff members might find it hard to share that information with their employer. “There is still a stigma associated with mental illness – in some cultures around the world it is simply not talked about at all, and even in more open cultures, there is often deep shame associated with it,” the group says.

The workplace as it presents itself in 2024 is often not a welcoming place for anyone, let alone for people already dealing silently with stress, burnout, depression or anxiety. Shift work, long working hours, job insecurity, conflicts between work and life, low job control and lack of support all contribute to workplace stress, Spicer says.

Deloitte experts Fisher and Bordeaux say that while many organisations are taking steps to support their workforces, there are trends, brought to the surface by the Covid-19 pandemic, that make those efforts unlikely to succeed:

• Research suggests that people are spending 288% more time in meetings than they did before the pandemic, without necessarily adding value to the organisation’s bottom line.

• Organisations sometimes use human beings as “middleware” to manage outdated technology systems.

• Heavy workloads – think of the manager who has more people reporting to them than there are hours in a day.

• “Always on” culture - lack or spoken or written expectations, particularly for remote or hybrid workers, mean that people feel they always need to be connected in case something comes up.

• Lack of leadership competency, with unrecognised anxiety in managers themselves leading to micro-managing of the teams that report to them.

What leadership can do

Situating wellness in the human resources department is not optimal: well-being is a board and C-suite issue, from the CEO down. The first thing leaders at those levels of a business can do is be open about their own mental health issues. The first hurdle to overcome is the traditional “show no weakness: mantra often used by leaders and authority figures, particularly in high stress industries like financial services, management consulting and manufacturing. Transformational leadershi skills are vital to make this sea-change happen.

But being open is critical. As former United States Surgeon General Jerome Adams says: “Stigma kills more people than cigarettes, than heroin, than any other risk factor. Because it keeps people in the shadows, it keeps people from asking for help, it keeps good people from being willing to offer help. And the way we overcome stigma is by sharing our stories as people who have mental-health issues of our own.”

In addition to being self-aware and transparent, leadership should be working on placing all aspects of DE&I into the heart of their business strategies, rather than viewing it as an add-on, a trend that’s starting to take hold in workplaces. These initiatives should aim to create a culture in which all employees can speak openly about all their struggles, including mental health.

As part of a DE&I programme, organisations should invest in the accessibility of professional mental health support for all employees, and work to equip managers and peers to support others and to navigate conversations around these issues.

Finally, and crucially, focus on the structural aspects of work:

Day-to-day work arrangements might not seem to be the province of the C-Suite. But experts say repeatedly that the structural aspects of work contribute hugely to mental health (or distress).

Things to look at:

• Pay scales – could salaries be improved? Think about other ways to reward people – parents of small children might value an extra allocation of annual leave more than a pay rise.

• Can you create employee resource groups to ensure support for under-represented employees? Depending on the interests of the group, a resource group could work on creating more leadership and promotion opportunities for women and groups of diverse employees, or helping women file HR complaints against unfair practices.

• Contracts – do they provide security for employees?

• Do employees have some flexibility and control over their work schedule, and over where they work?

• Are there opportunities for upskilling and mentoring?

• Can you cut back on pointless bureaucratic procedures? And streamline the technology that staff use?

• Can you reduce the length and number of meetings?

• Can staff rotas be improved?

• Can you improve the quality of frontline managers? Work on developing and enabling managers to create a culture of psychological safety.

• Can your managers negotiate, rather than silence, interpersonal conflict among employees?

• Could you move decision-making rights down to immediate team-leader level? That allows for more fit-for-purpose solutions that can be co-created with the team (rather than a directive from a leader that might overlook the day-to-day realities that their people are navigating).

• How about implementing wellness days? These are discretionary days off when employees need them (whether or not they have a diagnosable physical- or mental-health condition) and that don’t count against holidays or sick leave.