Why should businesses and employers care about the mental health of their employees? Isn’t that ultimately the responsibility of the employees themselves? It is a reasonable question. After all, businesses exist to provide products and services, satisfy customers and generate sustainable returns; while employees are adults with their own lives, choices and responsibilities. An employer is not a therapist, parent or guardian. But there is an important distinction between taking responsibility for an employee’s mental health and taking accountability for the conditions in which employees are expected to work.
Current research increasingly shows that work can protect mental health, but it can also damage it. Workload, excessive hours, lack of control, poor management, job insecurity, bullying, discrimination, inadequate resources and a lack of psychological safety are recognised psychosocial risks. The World Health Organization (WHO) and International Labour Organization (ILO) now explicitly call for employers to prevent and manage these risks rather than treating mental health as an issue employees must simply manage on their own.
For business leaders, therefore, the question should not be: “Why should we pay for our employees’ mental health?” It should be: “What is the cost to our organisation when we don’t?”
Mental health has become a business-performance issue. Approximately 15% of working-age adults globally are living with a mental disorder, according to WHO. Depression and anxiety alone are estimated to cost the global economy almost US$1 trillion every year in lost productivity. Those numbers are sufficiently large to make mental health impossible to dismiss as an exclusively personal matter. Mental health is a business matter, and will become increasingly so.
Within an organization, poor employee mental health rarely announces itself as “a mental-health problem.” It often appears within employees as:
- declining productivity;
- increasing absenteeism;
- presenteeism — being physically present but functioning below capacity;
- mistakes and poor decision-making;
- interpersonal conflict;
- disengagement;
- employees quietly doing the minimum necessary to get through the day;
and within the organization as:
- increased turnover;
- difficulty recruiting;
- safety incidents;
- reduced innovation;
- increased management burden; and
- declining customer service.
These are clearly significant business problems where mental health is often one of the underlying variables.
Burnout is a particularly expensive organizational problem. Burnout deserves particular attention because it is not simply another word for being tired. WHO defines burnout as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, and characterised by exhaustion, increased mental distance or cynicism toward the job, and reduced professional efficacy.
Burnout is absolutely not about employee weakness, insufficient resilience or inability to manage stress. Sometimes it is a rational response to an organisational system that continuously demands more than the employee can sustainably provide. In our experience in dealing with employee burnout, it is often the most committed and hard-working employees who suffer from burnout.
When valuable employees become exhausted, disengaged, absent or ineffective, organisations pay the cost – and they often pay several times. They pay for the employee’s lost productivity. Then they may pay for overtime or temporary cover. If that employee leaves, then they pay recruitment costs, onboarding and training cots, then the productivity gap while a replacement learns the job, and potentially the loss of institutional knowledge, customer relationships and team stability. The true cost of burnout is exponentially larger than the cost of a counselling session or an employee-assistance programme.
But, employers ask, shouldn’t employees be responsible for their own mental health? Why should that be one more thing the employer needs to be responsible for?
Good point. Clearly, employees have responsibilities. They need to manage their behaviour, seek help when necessary, communicate appropriately, develop coping skills and take reasonable responsibility for their own wellbeing. But organisations also have responsibilities. A company would not tell an employee, “Your physical safety is your responsibility. We don’t need safety procedures.” It would not accept a workplace with dangerous machinery and then blame employees for getting injured because they should have been more resilient.
Mental health deserves a similar distinction. An employee cannot “gratitude-journal” their way out of an impossible workload. A resilience workshop cannot compensate indefinitely for chronic understaffing. An employee-assistance programme cannot repair the real damage caused by a manager who humiliates people. A meditation app cannot fix the stress of working in an organisational culture where taking annual leave is perceived as insufficient commitment. And no amount of individual coping skills can completely neutralise a workplace that systematically creates excessive and unmanageable demands with insufficient guidance and support.
The responsibility for employee mental health is shared by both employers and employees. WHO and ILO guidance consequently emphasises that organisations should provide two things: support for individuals, and prevention of psychosocial risks in the workplace. This can take the form of proactive policies and guidelines around employee wellbeing, flexible working arrangements, mental health days, mental health first-aiders, and an employee assistance programmes.
The concern that we most often hear from employers is, “Won’t employees take advantage of it?” If we encourage people to talk about stress, offer mental-health leave, provide counselling and become more flexible, how can we be sure that some employees exploit the system? And the answer is that you can’t. But that is not an argument against supporting mental health. It is an argument for good management systems. Every organisational benefit can potentially be abused. Annual leave can be abused. Sick leave can be abused. Expense accounts can be abused. Flexible working can be abused. Yet businesses do not eliminate these systems. They establish reasonable policies, expectations, accountability and consequences. Mental-health support should be treated in exactly the same way.
A psychologically healthy organisation does not mean an organisation without performance standards. In fact, the opposite can be true. The strongest approach combines: high standards + high support + clear accountability. Employees should be expected to perform. Managers should also be expected to manage workloads, communicate effectively, address poor performance and create conditions in which people can realistically perform. Compassion and accountability are not opposites.
The second most common objection to providing employee mental health support is the cost. “Won’t this be expensive?” But this question needs to be asked differently. What are we comparing the investment with?If an organisation spends money providing psychological support, manager training, workload reviews and preventative interventions, that is an identifiable cost. The costs of doing nothing are often dispersed and invisible in the organization. They appear in recruitment budgets, sick leave, overtime, employee turnover, insurance and healthcare costs, errors, complaints and grievances, customer dissatisfaction, low productivity, lost working time, increased management time, workplace conflict, accidents, and reputational damage. Comparing the visible cost of prevention with the invisible cost of doing nothing is a poor financial comparison.
The strongest argument for workplace mental health is not sentimental, it is economic. People are one of the largest investments most organisations make. They represent knowledge, relationships, expertise, creativity, judgement, customer relationships and organisational memory. When employees are functioning well, organisations can access those assets. When employees are chronically exhausted, disengaged or psychologically unsafe, organisations are effectively paying for talent they are not fully able to use.
Not only is an underutilized employee a cost burden, but the costs can compound. A burned-out manager can affect an entire team. A disengaged team can affect customers. Poor customer experiences can affect reputation. High turnover creates additional workload for remaining employees. That additional workload creates further stress. And the cycle continues. This is why employee mental health should not be viewed simply as an HR benefit. It is a critical component of organisational risk management, workforce strategy, productivity management and sustainable performance.
There is a legitimate concern that organisations could spend too much on employee wellbeing. There is also a legitimate concern that some employees may misuse benefits. There is a legitimate concern that employers cannot — and should not — take responsibility for every aspect of an employee’s personal life. But these concerns do not invalidate the business case. They simply mean that mental-health initiatives should be strategic, evidence-based, measurable and accompanied by accountability.
The alternative is not “doing nothing.” The alternative is absorbing the consequences through turnover, absenteeism, disengagement, lost productivity, safety problems, recruitment difficulties and declining organisational trust.
The WHO’s position is increasingly clear: safe and healthy workplaces are more likely to reduce conflict, improve retention and improve work performance and productivity. And the business evidence increasingly points in the same direction. The question for business leaders is therefore no longer whether employee mental health is somehow their responsibility. A better question is, “How can we effectively support the mental health and wellbeing of our employees so they can successfully perform in their roles?” Employee mental health is not a charitable expense or the weakening of employee responsibility, it is an investment in the human system through which the business actually operates.
Email in**@***********ei.com to learn how Clarity can support your organisation’s employee mental health with an Employee Assistance Programme.
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