🧠 World Mental Health Day: Beyond Awareness to Action 🧠
- Lansbury HR
- Oct 17
- 2 min read
The recent recognition of World Mental Health Day (October 10th) underscores a crisis that is impacting your bottom line every day.
What’s it all about?
Data from the CIPD's September 2025 Health and Wellbeing at Work survey confirmed that mental health is now the leading cause of long-term absence. This critical issue is compounded by contemporary stressors, with the Mental Health Foundation highlighting a new threat: "overwhelm" from relentless news coverage of global crises, which employees are exposed to 24/7 via digital devices—a stressor that often follows them into the workplace. This makes the employer’s legal duty of care to protect employees from work-related stress (which affected 776,000 workers in 2023/24) more complex and immediate.
What does this mean for you?
Simply, is that mental wellbeing can no longer be a reactive or seasonal focus; it must be an integrated, year-round component of your core risk management strategy. A high rate of mental health-related absence directly impacts productivity and drives up operational costs. Ignoring the causes of workplace stress, including workload and management style, puts you at risk of breaching your legal duty of care. Furthermore, failing to address the impact of external stressors like "overwhelm" means you are losing talented employees to burnout and disengagement, making it harder to attract and retain staff in a competitive market.
Our Advice:
Move decisively from awareness to proactive prevention with clear actions:
Action 1: Formalise Your Policy. Implement robust mental health policies that clearly define support structures and making workplace adjustments.
Action 2: Train Your Managers. Provide mandatory, scenario-based training to equip managers to spot the signs of poor mental health and conduct sensitive conversations.
Action 3: Assess and Adjust. Actively identify the sources of stress within your organisation—including the impact of current affairs on specific roles—and make necessary workload or environmental adjustments to protect your employees' wellbeing and fulfil your legal obligations.
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