Mental Health Awareness Month: 5 Ways to Support Your Staff
Every May, Mental Health Awareness Month gives us all a chance to talk more openly about mental well-being. It aims to raise awareness, educate the public, and encourage open conversations about people’s wellbeing.
Most of us don’t talk about it enough, but mental health affects around one in four people in England every year. That’s a powerful reminder of why open, honest conversations matter so much. And when you add the pressures of work into the mix, creating space for those conversations becomes even more important.
If you’re a business owner, or you work for a company that’s pushing to make positive change, then this handy guide will help you get to grips with the impact of mental health, how to make meaningful change, and how to manage some of the cultural barriers that present their own challenge.
What is the impact of mental health?
In 2024/25, there were an estimated 964,000 workers suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety, resulting in 17.1 million working days lost. Deloitte estimates that poor mental health costs UK employers £51 billion a year.
Suffer from a mental health problem every year.
69% of managers say that supporting employee wellbeing is a core skill, but only 13% have received mental health training.
How can my company get involved?
We totally get it, the challenge of addressing mental health for your employees can be genuinely daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Mental Health Awareness Month really is the perfect opportunity to introduce new initiatives that will improve the well-being of your staff.
To help you get started, we’ve provided five initiatives for you to have a browse through, regardless of your company’s existing policies, programmes and wellbeing strategy.
1. Arrange mental health workshops and masterclasses
We promise we aren’t being biased here, but workshops and masterclasses are the perfect way for employees to gain easy access to relevant resources from professionals who know their stuff.
For example, in our masterclass on mental health awareness, our chosen industry experts will break down the true definition of ‘mental health’, what it means, and how it can affect you and your colleagues in your day-to-day lives. They’re a really engaging way of learning about mental health, but they also provide useful advice for addressing problems and, more importantly, where to get support.
If you fancied going one step further, then you could arrange for a puppy therapy event to be hosted at your offices, which is a sure-fire way of improving everyone’s day!
2. Provide staff with free access to wellbeing resources
There are a ton of great resources and tools out there that can help reduce stress, manage wellbeing, and generally improve the quality of your team’s life on a day-to-day basis.
All your company has to do is sign up for these tools and provide your workers with free access. There are loads of great apps and resources out there, but popular apps include Calm, which does a great job of reducing stress and improving sleep, and Headspace, which is excellent at improving your mood and providing mental well-being management.
3. Upskill your line managers
Sadly, one of the common issues we hear about is managers who don’t have the proper training or support they need to deal with the impact of mental health on members of their team.
Thankfully, with proper training from certified pros, line managers can learn how to address the challenges of poor mental health in the workplace. Typically, once managers have been to the training, they should be able to recognise the symptoms of mental health, how it’s displayed by sufferers, and, importantly, what they can do to help.
It may also sound a really obvious thing to say, but it’s also important that line managers understand what resources they actually have available to them. If they don’t know what they have access to, then how do you know if they’re doing everything possible to initiate the conversation and support a member of the team?
4. Review your internal policies
It may not be the most obvious or interesting thing to consider when compared to the other options mentioned, but May is a great time to think about internal policies related to the mental health and well-being of your employees. To really make the most of this, the review needs to go beyond the surface-level policies themselves and deep-dive into the policies that impact your staff’s day-to-day lives. You may be wondering what that would include. Well, here are some ideas:
▹ Working hours (e.g. how flexible are they?)
▹ Sickness absence (e.g. are mental health days penalised?)
▹ Performance management (e.g. are temporary adjustments allowed?)
It’s also worth asking your staff for anonymised feedback through a survey. If you can get everyone to engage with the survey, then the results will really help you understand what’s working well and what isn’t doing so great, giving you a great starting point for policy updates.
5. Implement an employee assistance programme (EAP)
An employee assistance programme (EAP) is a work benefit that provides employees with confidential support and resources for any issues affecting their personal or work life.
Third parties usually offer them, so you don’t have to do as much heavy lifting as you’d think, but they’ll give your staff access to some great services, such as:
▹ Financial advice
▹ Mental health support
▹ General counselling
If your company doesn’t have one in place already, then there’s no better time to think about one than during Mental Health Awareness Month. They aren’t necessarily the cheapest option compared to the other recommendations we’ve mentioned, but given that they provide employees with confidential support all year round, and not just for a month, they’re worth their weight in gold.
How do cultural barriers change the conversation?
Culture’s a tough one because it can shape whether conversations about mental health happen at all. Sadly, in some cultures, stigma still surrounds mental health, which can make people reluctant to speak openly about how they are feeling.
Because of this, mental distress is often displayed as physical symptoms (think things like headaches and burnout), so it really is important that your managers are trained to understand the different ways mental health problems can reveal themselves, especially if you work somewhere diverse.
If you’re going to be promoting messages about mental health in work, you should really make it clear that employees have access to a safe space to discuss their wellbeing. Everyone should be given access to this anyway, regardless of their culture or ethnicity, but it reinforces the importance of consistency and inclusive messaging.
Oh, and one last thing, when thinking about the messaging you promote, avoid adopting a generic approach that’s designed to appeal to everyone in the same way. Your employees, across all different ethnic groups, need to be able to recognise the symptoms in themselves and feel confident that relevant, accessible support is available if they want or need it.
Here if you need support
Mental health awareness is a topic that’s not going anywhere, and it’s one that won’t be helped by things like the ongoing cost of living crisis and world affairs. Work brings its own unique challenges for many, such as trying to adopt a healthy work-life balance or deal with work-related stress, so it’s essential that businesses recognise the impact of mental health, and provide a consistent, well-thought-out, system of support for all employees, regardless of their background.
If you need support for your business, then we’d love to help. Our masterclasses really do offer a great way to educate your employees through interactive online sessions that are hosted by trained professionals. Alternatively, our puppy therapy events are simply unbeatable for the joy they bring to the people who attend.
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