The UK is facing a work and health crisis. Nearly 2.8 million people are out of work due to ill health, with mental health conditions a key driver of this rise over the past decade.

Mental health conditions affect workers across all ages and backgrounds, and often combine with physical health conditions to make employment harder to sustain. The impact is particularly acute among young people, with poor mental health recognised as one factor behind the UK reaching a record one million young people aged 16-24 not in education, employment or training.

So, what role should employers play?

Work Foundation research highlights a clear gap between confidence and action. While 83% of employers rate their performance as good or very good in supporting staff with common mental health conditions, only 41% formally assess mental health risks.

At the Work and Health Summit 2026, Professor Stavroula Leka’s opening presentation argued that the UK is not alone in facing this challenge, but other countries are responding differently. A panel discussion chaired by Ben Harrison explored how organisations can embed mentally healthy work environments to support people to stay in work.

Mental health at work has changed but action still lags behind awareness

Over the last decade, there has been a significant shift in the way mental health is discussed at work.

Dr Richard Peters (Chief Medical Officer, JLR) said the Covid-19 pandemic had been “a catalyst for a focus on health”, helping to move mental health closer to the centre of organisational thinking. He argued that stigma has reduced in many workplaces, “We talk about mental health now but back in 2015/16, we didn’t want to talk about mental health.”

This openness matters, as the panel discussed that more workers appear comfortable talking about their mental health with their employers.

Brian Dow (Chief Executive, Mental Health UK) stated greater awareness is not enough and said progress has been uneven. “There has been a sea change in the confidence that people feel to talk about their mental health,” he said. But he warned there remains “a really big gap” between people’s confidence to talk and whether their employer has a clear plan to promote good mental health at work.

Professor Stavroula Leka placed the discussion in an international context. She argued that while other countries face similar pressures, the difference has been “courage and coordination”. Mentally healthy work must be designed deliberately, not treated as a disparate series of wellbeing initiatives sitting outside the organisation. In Norway and Finland, they have put these principles into practice. Stakeholders including policymakers, employers and workers have been brought together to develop evidence, implement interventions and evaluate them.

Line managers matter but they cannot carry the system alone

A major theme was the central role of line managers in supporting people with mental health conditions to stay in work. Hannah Pearsall (a workforce wellbeing expert) put it simply, “The line manager is an intervention.” The day-to-day experience of work is often shaped by the relationship between an employee and their manager. The panel were clear that managers should not be expected to diagnose mental health conditions or become clinical experts. However, they do need the confidence, skills and support to have compassionate conversations and signpost staff to appropriate help.

“If all we’re doing is encouraging people to be honest with us about the support that they need, but we’re not then equipping our managers to handle what might happen next, that’s not helpful at all,” Hannah Pearsall said.

Brian Dow built on this point, arguing that management should not be seen as a “soft skill”. If the relationship with a manager is one of the strongest drivers of wellbeing at work, supporting managers around mental health is a key business capability.

But line managers cannot be left to solve this alone. Stavroula Leka cautioned that while compassionate leadership and line manager training are valuable, interventions focused only on managers do not always produce the desired effects across the workforce. She suggested that training managers matters, but it must be backed by leadership, proactive policies, good work design, strengthened employee voice and access to support.

Prevention must be built into job design

The strongest message from the panel was that employers need to move from reactive support to prevention.

Too often, workplaces respond after someone starts to struggle, or when they notice an employee is absent from work or at risk of leaving the organisation. Hannah Pearsall warned that much of the data organisations rely on is “lagging data” – evidence of problems that have already happened. She said many employers are “literally putting the fire out as opposed to stopping the fire from lighting in the first place.”

For Richard Peters, prevention requires employers to recognise the combined pressures people face. Poor mental health at work may be affected by workload, trust, financial stress, social pressures and personal circumstances. He described this as a “full stress bucket” and argued that organisations need a range of support because not every worker will feel comfortable accessing help in the same way.

The panel agreed that it requires more than a single intervention such as a wellbeing app or a one-off awareness campaign. It means looking at workload, autonomy, job security, flexibility, bullying, financial wellbeing and the quality of relationships at work.

Stavroula Leka argued that the evidence base is now strong enough to show the business benefits. “If you collect the right indicators, the right metrics, you are able actually to show the return on investment,” she said, including impacts on innovation, productivity and retention.

Embedding mentally healthy work environments means moving beyond crisis response. It means designing work that supports people to stay well, training managers to respond well when problems emerge, and ensuring senior leaders treat psychological health and safety as core to performance.

The question is whether the UK can show the courage and coordination needed to respond differently.

To read our latest research on work and health, please see: Unequal support: Employer views on workforce health in 2026.

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