Keep your team up and running by giving them the support they need to deal with personal and professional challenges with Spill.
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- Mental health at work is the impact working life has on employee mental wellbeing.
- Every £1 invested in mental health support at work can generate a £7 return on investment.
- To support mental health at work, employers need to understand the specific challenges their employees face before choosing the level of mental health support that will be most effective.
- Supporting mental health at work is ongoing piece of work — as your team evolves, so will the support they need.
What is mental health at work?
Mental health at work refers to the impact working life has on mental wellbeing.
In many cases this is overwhelmingly positive — we get paid, have a routine, and a community. But the workplace can also lead to mental health challenges, and with one in four people struggling with their mental health each year, supporting mental health at work is more than just a recruiting tickbox: it can genuinely be a lifeline for a struggling employee.
Why are employers responsible for supporting mental health at work?
As an employer, you have a duty of care for your employees — and this includes protecting them from mental health risks like dealing with excessive workloads, working long hours, having poor career development, or no clarity on job role. But, wellbeing and work are more intertwined than that: personal struggles and world events still impact people during the 9-5 working day.
Your employees are a team of wonderful, individual humans and as their employer, you have a responsibility to help them thrive. And it’s not just good for them – it pays off for your company, too.
2 (big) reasons to support mental health at work
1. Mental health support at work saves your company time and money
Poor mental health accounts for 50% of long-term sick leave in the UK while 61% of UK employees cite mental health as a reason for leaving, or planning to leave, their job. Combine the cost of sick leave and turnover with presenteeism — coming to work despite feeling too mentally unwell to work effectively — and mental health costs companies an average of £1,529 per year, per employee.
💙 Supporting mental health at work can reduce sickness and absence rates by up to 50%
💙 81% of employees will look for workplaces that support mental health at work when they seek future job opportunities
💙 The right mental health support at work (more on that later) can generate a return on investment of around £7 for every £1 invested
2. Mental health support at work lets your employees bring their best selves to work
This year, 55% of employees will be unable to work or feel low, anxious, and unmotivated due to their mental health.
💙 Supporting mental health at work can reduce levels of anxiety and depression in 75% of employees
💙 Happy employees are 13% more productive
💙 60% of employees are more motivated at work if their employer offers mental health support at work
Spill gives your team quick access to high-quality workplace therapy in just three clicks.
How to know if an employee needs mental health support at work
Spotting the signs of stress or poor mental health at an early stage means your employee can get the support they need before things escalate and they become really unwell.
The difficulty is, mental health challenges look different for everyone. Often, the key sign is a change in someone’s usual behaviour or routine, but these changes can be small. As a founder, head of department, or manager, you have an essential role in spotting the need for mental health support at work. So, encourage your managers to regularly check-in with their teams and make sure they can recognise the signs of poor mental health.
To help, we’ve put together a few possible indicators that an employee is struggling with their mental health.
Please, please, please note: this list is absolutely not exhaustive. The real idea here is to highlight that mental health challenges can change someone physically, psychologically, or behaviourally.
A final word of advice: never make assumptions about someone’s mental health (or worse, listen to gossip). Always talk to the individual directly and let them talk in their own time.
How to support mental health at work in 3 steps
When it comes to supporting mental health at work, it can feel like a bit of a minefield: search ‘how to support mental health at work’ on Google, and you’ll be overwhelmed with information and options.
So, we’ve kept it simple. Below, you’ll find three steps to guide you through the process of supporting mental health at work:
- Understand why you want to support mental health at work
- Decide how you want to support mental health at work
- Commit to ongoing mental health support at work
Let's explore each step in more detail 👇
Step 1: Understand why you want to support mental health at work
Before you can start providing meaningful and impactful workplace mental health support, you need to first understand the problem your team is facing.
Why? Because there’s absolutely no point in setting up mental health support at work if it doesn’t target the areas taking up your team’s headspace.
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🎬 Your first action to support mental health at work
Carry out an employee wellbeing survey to get an up-to-date read on how your team is feeling, what they’re struggling with, and what’s going well (never forget the positives).
By regularly asking your team how they’re doing, you’ll find out what support they need — and how best to help. Without this data, it’s easy to prioritise the wrong ideas. But when you’re armed with this information, you can make informed decisions about how best to support your team’s mental health at work.
Step 2: Decide how you want to support mental health at work
Once you know what’s troubling your team, you can start supporting their specific problems.
We’ve identified three different levels of supporting mental health at work. They’re ranked from low-high (bronze, silver, and gold) based on the amount of investment required, but we can assure you every single one is sure to have an impact.
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🎬 Your second action to support mental health at work
Decide which level of support you want to offer your team: think about their concerns, their needs, and the level of financial investment you’re able to commit to (all the while keeping that 1:7 ROI in mind).
🥉Bronze: internal mental health support at work
The most ‘basic’ level of support but arguably the foundation of all mental health support at work. This level is a great starting point for companies with little or no budget, or who are just getting started with supporting mental health at work.
In the interests of transparency, supporting mental health at work internally does require a fairly big investment in time and resources for the person responsible for HR/people/culture, and that might be difficult in smaller teams.
With this level of support, you won’t be paying for a mental health solution for your team. Instead, you’ll support mental health at work with three internal actions:
- (Regularly) ask your team how they’re doing: run quarterly employee wellbeing surveys, invite staff to ask questions, run retros, or introduce 360 feedback to generate more touch points with your team.
- Introduce new company policies to protect employees: establish the company bottom line and ways of working with policies that care for your team while treating everyone (leadership included!) equally.
- Create a psychologically safe workplace: bring mental health into your company’s everyday life by investing time in your team’s culture.
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Workplace policies from Spill that support mental health at work:
👉 Mental health in the workplace policy
👉 Mental health discrimination policy
👉 Right to disconnect policy
👉 Employee bereavement policy
👉 Mental health sick leave policy
👉 Workplace needs assessment
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Psychological safety resources from Spill:
👉 The four stages of psychological safety
👉 20 ways for leaders to create psychological safety at work
👉 How to measure psychological safety at work
👉 10 psychological safety exercises for building a stronger team
🥈Silver: reactive mental health support at work
Reactive mental health support at work refers to the help an employee can get once they’re already feeling low, stressed, burned out, or generally too emotionally exhausted and unwell to work. This is the support that gets your employees back on their feet.
Common types of reactive support are employee assistance programmes (EAPs) or employee health insurance, both of which offer employee counselling. But while they’re often affordable, they’re not suitable for small teams and an employee can wait a long time to get the help they need.
To offer immediate support to struggling employees, we’d recommend the Spill Starter Plan instead (plot twist, of course we want to tell you about Spill — but it’s worth listening!). We created this plan specifically to fill a gap in the market: helping companies with smaller budgets support mental health at work without the annual/monthly subscription that most other employee mental health solutions require.
Offering targeted mental health support to a specific number of employees, Spill’s Starter Plan lets you:
- Choose which employees you want to offer therapy to
- Cap the total number of therapy sessions available per person (hello, budget control)
- Pay only for the therapy sessions used
- Cancel or change plans anytime with a 30-day rolling contract
- See therapy usage, employee feedback, and outcome scores to measure effectiveness
As for your struggling employees, they’ll get:
- Instant access to the top 13% of BACP- or NCS-registered therapists
- Specialist support in over 80 areas of expertise, like anxiety, divorce, bereavement, ADHD, and OCD
- Next-day therapy sessions, including evenings and weekends, in 15+ languages, across multiple time zones
- Fully secure and confidential support — only the user and their therapist will ever know what was discussed
🥇 Gold: proactive mental health support at work
Proactive mental health solutions means your company offers ‘always on’ care for your teams’ emotional wellbeing. It’s a way to spot people before they start to dip and to prevent early warning signs from escalating, like a screening programme.
Deloitte hails this kind of workplace mental health support as the best way to support mental health at work, not only in terms of employee wellbeing, but financially, too. By providing support at an early stage and preventing a mental health issue from escalating, screening programmes (coupled with personal therapy) have the highest return on investment compared to other mental health solutions.
Spill Safety Net is our very own mental health screening programme and is available on Spill’s Team Plan. An opportunity for you to emotionally check-in with your team before a meeting, Safety Net also flags any of your employees who are struggling. And if that happens, one of our therapists personally gets in touch to offer support.
Safety Net is an integral part of Spill: it’s how we proactively support over 30,000 employees and give their employers peace of mind that no one is going to slip through the cracks.
As well as Safety Net, the Team Plan comes with all the same bells and whistles as our Starter Plan —they’re just available to your whole team rather than a few specific employees!
Step 3: commit to ongoing mental health support at work
It might sound obvious, but (spoiler alert!) supporting mental health at work is never a finished job.
As your business and team evolve, so will the concerns and stressors that impact mental wellbeing. We know that you can’t devote every waking moment of your time to employee mental health (which is both normal and a very good thing, for your own mental health!), but do try to revisit it regularly.
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🎬 Your third action to support mental health at work
Commit to supporting your team’s mental health by choosing a few ongoing initiatives to introduce.
Below are a few simple ways to continuously support mental health at work as your business continues to do its wonderful work. But if you want some more inspiration, take a look at our guide about initiatives to improve workplace wellbeing where you’ll find 51 (rather good) ideas.
⏰ Set calendar reminders to block out focused time (monthly, quarterly, it’s up to you) to think about and review your company’s mental health support and policies.
🤝 Form a mental health committee to keep an eye on how the team is doing and come up with solutions that let the wider team learn about and check-in with their own mental health.
💬 Introduce employee resource groups (ERGs), a voluntary, employee-led initiative that brings together staff with shared background or interests.
💙 Train a few employees in Mental Health First Aid so they can spot early signs of mental ill-health in their co-workers, offering reassurance and appropriate guidance to anyone who might be struggling.
🧠 Share useful resources with the team to continue raising awareness of mental health, challenging the stigma, and providing regular opportunities to learn more about mental health at work. Our guides and resources are a good place to start!
📢 Promote any mental health support that’s available, constantly — there’s no such thing as too much promo, so send round emails, share updates and how-to manuals on Slack, plaster the information all round the office. Just keep on spreading the word.
🗣️ Use your managers to keep the mental health conversation going by asking them to check-in with their reports, signpost any help available, and encourage them to share their own experiences with their teams — change happens from the top down.
Further resources to support mental health at work
Mental health at work can be complicated and while we hope this guide is useful, we know it won’t contain all the information you might need. H
ere are a few extra resources to help you support mental health at work:
📚 Resources for you, the employer:
- Acas: Supporting mental health at work
- Mind: Taking care of your staff’s mental health
- Mental health at work
- CIPD: Supporting mental health at work: Guide for people managers
💙 External organisations to support your employees:
☎️ NHS helplines and services:
- England – mental health helplines on the NHS
- Scotland – mental health services on NHS 24
- Wales – mental health services on NHS 111 Wales
And there we have it, our guide to supporting mental health at work! Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to level-up the support for your team, remember to take it a step at a time — you’re in the long game, so focus on making meaningful change rather than a lot of change all in one go. You’ve got this!
Therapy with Spill reliably reduces mental health symptoms in 72% of cases and can be accessed by anyone on your team.
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