From Awareness to Action: What UK Employers Can Do for Mental Health at Work

Mental Health Awareness Week 2026 runs from 11th to 17th May, with this year’s theme: Every Action Counts.

If you’re a business owner or HR manager in the UK, mental health at work is probably something you’re already thinking about.. The harder question is what you’re actually doing about it.

As expectations around workplace wellbeing continue to evolve, employees are looking for more than surface-level support; they want workplaces where mental health is genuinely prioritised in everyday working life.

While awareness around mental health has grown significantly in recent years, that alone doesn’t always lead to meaningful change. A wellbeing initiative, campaign or internal communication can help start conversations, but lasting impact comes from the actions businesses take consistently over time.

For employers, that creates an important challenge: how do you move beyond good intentions and create a workplace where employees feel supported, valued and able to thrive?

The answer often lies in practical, sustainable changes rather than one-off gestures. From improving communication and manager support to reviewing workloads and creating psychologically safe environments, small actions can make a significant difference to employee wellbeing over the long term.

In this article, we’ll explore:

• Why mental health at work still needs action. 
• Why awareness alone can fall short. 
• The practical steps UK employers can take to build healthier, more supportive workplaces.

Why mental health at work still needs action

The current state of workplace mental health in the UK

Workplace stress, burnout and poor wellbeing are continuing to affect employees across the UK. It’s a real problem many UK businesses and employees face. The reality is, the rising levels of stress, burnout and long-term sickness absence have an impact. And all of this is amplified by economic pressures, heavy workloads and changing ways of working. 

Burnout has become a growing concern across industries, with employees reporting higher levels of stress and reduced job satisfaction. In fact, Employment Hero commissioned research found that 28% of employees have taken a sick day when they were not physically unwell, rising to 34% among full-timers. When asked why, the no. 1 reason is because they were feeling emotionally or mentally burnt out. But it’s not just employees struggling. For many UK businesses, the impact extends far beyond individual wellbeing and can have real world consequences for businesses. 

Poor mental health can contribute to:

• Increased absenteeism and presenteeism.
• Lower productivity and engagement.
• Higher staff turnover.
• Greater pressure on managers and HR teams.
• Increased recruitment and replacement costs.

It’s important to recognise that mental health concerns don’t always look the same from one person to another. While some employees may openly communicate that they’re struggling, others may mask stress until it reaches crisis point. This is why relying on your team to speak up isn’t enough. Business owners and HR managers need proactive strategies that help identify risks early and create an environment where support feels accessible and normal.

Why awareness alone falls short

Over recent years, workplace wellbeing initiatives have become far more common and this is a step in the right direction. But awareness campaigns alone rarely create lasting change.

A single webinar during Mental Health Awareness Week or a one-off wellbeing email may generate conversation temporarily, but meaningful support requires consistency and action. In simple terms, if you’re going to address mental health in the workplace, you need to do it right because employees quickly notice the difference between businesses that genuinely prioritise mental health and those that treat wellbeing as a tick-box exercise.

Employees today are also more informed about mental health than ever before. Many now expect employers to provide practical support, flexible working options, psychologically safe environments and leaders who actively model healthy behaviours. 

This shift means employers need to move beyond performative wellbeing and focus on embedding mental health support into everyday working life. That includes reviewing workloads, improving communication, training managers, encouraging regular check-ins, and creating policies that genuinely support employees in practice, not just on paper.

What ‘taking action’ really means for businesses

Moving from awareness to action means changing how you think about mental health at work. Not as a box to tick, or a week in May to acknowledge, but as something embedded in how your business operates all year round.

• From reactive to proactive. Many employers only address mental health when something goes wrong, when someone is signed off sick, or when a manager finally flags a concern. Proactive support means creating the conditions where problems are spotted earlier and people feel safe enough to ask for help before they reach crisis point.
• From HR’s responsibility to everyone’s. Mental health isn’t something that sits with HR. It’s shaped by how managers behave, how leaders communicate and what your culture actually rewards. If your organisation praises people who work weekends and never switch off, that’s a culture problem no Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) can fix.
• From policy to practice. Having a mental health policy is not the same as having a mentally healthy workplace. What matters is whether your policies are understood, applied consistently, and backed up by behaviour at every level of the business.
• From uniform to inclusive. Mental health support needs to work for everyone, including remote workers who might feel isolated, frontline staff who can’t easily step away for a conversation, and employees who are less likely to self-identify as struggling. One-size-fits-all doesn’t work here.

7 practical actions UK businesses can take right now

Supporting mental health at work doesn’t have to involve major change. Often, small practical actions can make a meaningful difference to employee wellbeing, engagement and retention. Here are seven steps UK businesses can take right now to build a healthier, more supportive workplace.

1. Train managers to have better conversations

Business owners and HR professionals aren’t the only people responsible for championing mental health. Line managers also play a key role as they are your employees’ first point of contact at work  and the people most likely to notice when someone isn’t coping. But noticing isn’t enough. It’s important for line managers to be equipped to respond when members of their team are struggling. 

Good mental health training for managers is simpler than you might think. It’s all about helping them to listen well, spot the signs of someone who’s struggling and know how to signpost professional support without trying to fix everything themselves. 

2. Review and update your mental health policies

UK businesses have legal duties under the Equality Act 2010 and the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. The HSE’s Management Standards for work-related stress provide a practical framework to help employers meet those duties. So although mental health is all about your people, there are some admin elements as well. A solid mental health or wellbeing policy is a must-have and it should reflect your legal obligations.

But with so many other tasks on the agenda, a mental health policy is something that can easily slip under the radar… so it might be time for an update. A strong mental health policy goes beyond a statement of intent. It sets out:

• What support is available.
• How employees can access it.
• What reasonable adjustments look like.
• What the escalation process is. 

3. Offer flexible working where possible

Since April 2024, employees have had the legal right to request flexible working from their first day of employment under the Flexible Working (Amendment) Regulations 2023. This means employers must consider requests in a reasonable manner and respond within the statutory timeframe, although requests can still be refused on specific business grounds set out in legislation.

For many people, flexible working is a huge perk and according to GWI research those working in companies that don’t offer flexible arrangements are 8% more likely to feel overworked and 7% more likely to be prone to anxiety.

The ability to adjust start times, work from home on difficult days, or compress hours to manage personal responsibilities can make a real difference to how people experience work.

But flexibility doesn’t need to be unlimited or unstructured. It needs to be fair and managed in a way that works for the business. Small adjustments, applied thoughtfully, often have a bigger impact on employee wellbeing than large formal programmes.

4. Make support visible and easy to access

Having a strong support offering is one thing, but it amounts to very little if your team doesn’t know about it. 

An Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) gives employees confidential access to professional support services, including counselling and practical advice. While conversations are treated confidentially, there may be limited exceptions in safeguarding situations or where there is a risk of serious harm. Support typically includes:

• Counselling.
• Financial advice.
• Legal guidance. 

Counselling, financial advice and legal guidance can all have a positive impact on mental health. So for businesses that don’t yet have an EAP in place, it’s worth looking into. Employment Hero offers an Employee Assistance Programme as part of its platform, built to be accessible and easy to promote across your workforce.

To ensure your team knows about your wellbeing support, provide information about your EAP regularly and in places your employees actually look and normalise talking about it. If your leaders reference it openly, employees are more likely to use it without feeling stigmatised. The goal is to make accessing support feel as routine as booking a GP appointment.

5. Encourage regular check-ins (not just annual reviews)

Annual performance reviews aren’t the only time you should be talking to your team. These meetings are too infrequent and formal to be the main time in which employees can discuss how they’re doing. 

Regular one-to-ones create space for honest conversations before things escalate. The focus doesn’t have to be entirely on wellbeing. But creating space for broader check-ins opens the door. 

The key is consistency. Ad-hoc conversations are better than nothing, but structured check-ins signal that the business genuinely values what its people are going through, not just what they’re delivering.

6. Use data to identify risks early

Most businesses are sitting on data that could tell them a great deal about the state of their workforce’s mental health. Absence rates, turnover trends, employee engagement survey results and even patterns in overtime can all be early warning signs.

The challenge is connecting the dots. If a team has unusually high sickness absence, that’s worth investigating before it becomes a retention problem. If engagement scores in a particular department have dropped two quarters in a row, that’s a conversation waiting to happen.

Using HR data proactively, rather than just for reporting, is one of the most underused mental health tools available to employers.

7. Lead from the top

Workplace culture is set from the top down. If your senior leaders don’t talk openly about mental health, don’t model healthy boundaries and don’t hold themselves to the same standards they expect from employees, no amount of policy or training will change the culture.

Leadership behaviour includes the visible stuff, such as whether executives send emails at midnight and what message that sends, as well as the less visible stuff, like how leadership responds when someone raises a concern. When leaders get this right, it gives everyone else permission to do the same.

How technology can support mental health at work

Mental health support isn’t just about what HR communicates. It’s also about whether the systems businesses use every day make people’s working lives easier or harder.

HR teams in particular often carry an enormous admin burden, updating records, managing absence, chasing paperwork, coordinating reviews. That time spent on manual processes is time not spent having the conversations that matter. When HR is stretched thin, the people-focused work is the first to suffer.

Technology that handles the admin, without creating more complexity, frees up capacity for meaningful employee support. Centralising policies and wellbeing resources in one place means employees can find what they need without having to ask. Structured check-in tools make regular conversations easier to schedule and track. Absence management features make it possible to spot patterns early, before they become serious.

Employment Hero brings all of this together in one platform, including an Employee Assistance Programme that’s built into the employee experience rather than bolted on as an afterthought. Easy to access support is more likely to get used, meaning a healthier workforce and a more productive business. 

For businesses managing teams across different locations, remote setups, or shift-based roles, having consistent access to support through a single platform removes a lot of the practical barriers that stop employees from getting help.

Action builds better workplaces

Mental Health Awareness Week is a useful prompt. But marking the occasion is a starting point, not the finish line. The real aim is building a workplace where mental health is looked after every day.

The actions don’t have to be complicated or expensive, they just require consistency, accountability and the willingness to treat mental health as a genuine business priority rather than a communications exercise. Small steps, done consistently, compound over time. That’s what “every action counts” actually means.

If you’re looking for the right tools to support your people, manage the admin and build a healthier workplace, Employment Hero can help.