Workplace mental health has come a long way since the Health and Safety at Work Act became law just over 50 years ago. And even further still since the Mental Health Foundation launched Mental Health Awareness Week in 2001. But, as with any form of social progress, there’s always more work to be done. Which is why it makes sense that, this year, the theme set by the foundation is action.
For employers – especially those in small and medium businesses – understanding the best approach to take in order to foster a healthy and legally compliant work environment isn’t always straightforward. Most business leaders know they should be doing something. The question this week asks is: what, exactly?
For large employers, finding the answer to that question will usually come with a budget and a team. But for the millions of small businesses that make up the backbone of the economy, that responsibility often falls on one person, without dedicated HR support.
Awareness Has Risen. The Numbers Haven’t
Last year, 22.1 million working days were lost to work-related stress, depression and anxiety in the UK, according to the Health and Safety Executive, Britain’s national regulator for workplace health and safety. The highest figure on record, it has risen despite high levels of awareness of the importance of workplace mental health. Meanwhile, a quarter of UK workers say their job is actively harming their mental health, according to the CIPD’s 2025 Health and Wellbeing at Work report.
The strain is showing in other ways too. Employment Hero’s 2025 Employment Uncovered survey found that 49% of UK workers have taken a sick day because they felt mentally or emotionally exhausted – not physically ill. And 44% felt obliged to check work during annual leave, rising to more than half of workers aged 18 to 34.
The problem isn’t ignorance or indifference. The problem isn’t ignorance or indifference. Much of the guidance on workplace mental health – the benchmarks, the recommended interventions – was built with larger organisations in mind. As such, some small employers can fall into the trap of absorbing messaging that wasn’t designed for them, measuring themselves against it, and concluding they are failing. But in many cases, they may simply be using the wrong template.
How Small Business Owners Can Expand Their Mental Health Knowledge
Gill Wetherill, founder of Full Circle HR, has a unique perspective on why these challenges persist. A former HR director for larger organisations who has spent her career observing the disconnect between policy and practice, she now advises small businesses on their people strategy.
“I think sometimes business owners or managers are quite nervous around the area of mental health and they maybe don’t see it as their responsibility,” she says.
“They realise they’ve got responsibilities around health and safety, legal duty of care, risk assessments and that kind of thing. But I’m not sure that everybody understands that it can go much wider than that.”
The more common misconception, she says, is that meaningful mental health support requires the kind of infrastructure most small businesses don’t have: an employee assistance programme (EAP), a trained mental health first aider, a formal wellbeing policy. While useful, they’re not where employers have to start.
“People might think that providing mental health support is about counselling – that it’s not their responsibility or they haven’t got the budget for it,” Wetherill says. “But really good managers recognise that it is so much more. Having those everyday conversations, or regular one-to-ones, so that people can discuss things like workload, clarity around responsibilities, recognition, psychological safety – that kind of thing just really helps move things forward.”
The benchmark, in her experience, is set by large employers. Small businesses measure themselves against it and conclude they’re falling short – when the gap between what they think they’re supposed to do and what would truly help is often wider than they realise, and runs in the opposite direction to what they assume.
What Supporting Mental Health At Work Should Look Like
Mental Health Awareness Week frames action at three levels: for yourself, for someone else, for all of us. In the context of a small business, those three levels rarely operate as separate programmes with separate owners, meaning SME leaders often have the hard task of juggling it all. But there are some approaches that can help with all three.
Gill recommends “having proper one-to-one conversations with everybody” as a start.
“Unrushed ones, they don’t have to be very lengthy – really asking the questions about how everything’s going. How are you, really? It doesn’t cost anything.”
But good intentions alone aren’t enough, especially if the person doing the checking in also hasn’t considered their own mental health needs in the workplace too. As Gill points out, the signals SME leaders send through their own behaviour matter at least as much as anything support they offer their employees.
“I’ve made this mistake myself, as a line manager in a scale-up – working every hour God sends, getting in early, working through lunch,” she says. “I always encouraged my team to take a lunch break, and then gradually I noticed that they weren’t. And it suddenly hit me one day that they weren’t doing that because I wasn’t doing that. With all good intentions of trying to encourage them to have breaks – if I’m not doing it myself, for some reason that rubs off on people.”
When Workplace Mental Health Initiatives Miss The Point
The CIPD’s 2025 Health and Wellbeing at Work research found that poor relationships with colleagues and lack of support from managers are among the top drivers of poor mental health at work. Recognition is part of that picture too – Employment Hero’s 2026 Work That Works report found that half of all employees don’t feel recognised enough in their jobs, with only 18% rating their company a 10/10 for recognising their work. It goes further: small businesses who rate themselves well for employee recognition are also 40% less likely to have retention problems.
“There’s sometimes a gap between what business owners think they should do – bigger gestures like getting an EAP in place or having some mental health awareness days – and the reality of what actually helps move the needle,” says Gill. She stresses that the most effective approaches concern “good line management, opening conversations, building relationships, being there to listen – and then making sure that you follow through with action.”
This Mental Health Awareness Week, Start Something That Lasts
Mental Health Awareness Week runs from 11 to 17 May. But for small business owners, the work of building a people-centred culture doesn’t start and stop with a calendar moment.
The week is useful insofar as it creates permission – to open a conversation you’ve been putting off, to ask a question you weren’t sure was appropriate, to acknowledge something that’s been visible but unaddressed.
For any SME leader hoping to foster a healthier work environment, what really matters is not letting mental health awareness fall by the wayside when the week ends.
Employment Hero is hosting a free five-day breakfast webinar series for UK managers during Mental Health Awareness Week, running daily at 9:30am from 11-15 May. Each session covers a real workplace scenario – from having that first difficult conversation to navigating the line between mental health and performance.
