Mental Health Awareness Week 2025: How employers can support their staff

May 12, 2025

Mental Health Awareness Week 2025: How employers can support their staff

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By Rachel Ford-Evans

To mark Mental Health Awareness Week, our employment law expert Rachel discusses the impacts of mental ill health in the workplace for both employers and workers, and what employers can do to support their staff.

Mental health and the workplace

Research conducted by training provider RRC International has found that around 7.5 million workers in the UK suffer with mental ill health. Often, these issues can be caused or exacerbated by work-related stress.

Commonly-reported work concerns that may affect employees’ mental health include:

• Unrealistic demands from senior staff, such as high workloads and pressure to meet deadlines
• Lack of proper support and training
• Pay and financial concerns
• Poor communication and a lack of transparency from management
• Feeling under-appreciated, due to e.g. lack of progression or preferential treatment given to other employees

What duties do employers have relating to their employees’ mental health?

Employers owe a duty of care to their employees, to support them and safeguard their health and safety.

In addition, under the Equality Act 2010, employers have a legal obligation to make reasonable adjustments for workers who may suffer from disabilities, which can include mental health conditions if they are serious and long-term.

Those workers will also be protected from discrimination under the Equality Act.

Impact of not prioritising and supporting staff mental health

Many businesses are now placing a greater focus on fostering a healthy working environment where employees’ mental health is prioritised, but many can still do more. If employers are not correctly following their obligations, they risk negative consequences for both their workforce and themselves:

• Employers not supporting their employees effectively can damage a worker’s mental health, financial situations, and personal lives.
• Failures to properly support their workforce can also result in negative outcomes for employers. Employers which don’t support their employees who suffer from mental ill health, or are stressed at work, are more likely to see higher sickness absence rates, impacts on productivity, and higher staff turnover.

In addition, employers which treat employees with long-term mental health issues unfavourably, or fail to provide reasonable adjustments to help them at work, could be vulnerable to added costs via disability discrimination claims in an Employment Tribunal.

How can employers meet their duties?

To comply with their legal duties and support the mental health of their employees and workers, employers should do the following:

• Encourage open and honest dialogue with employees to understand any difficulties they may be facing in their role. Research from Forbes has shown that workers who feel that their voices are heard are over 4 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work.
• Help employees to have sensible work-life balances by not expecting them to work long hours or setting unrealistic expectations, and monitoring and managing their workloads. Employers should also ensure that workers feel able to (and do) take their allotted annual leave – in fact, this is a legal duty under the Working Time Regulations 1998.
• Implementing different ways of working, for example by allowing employees to follow a hybrid model of office based and remote working (if that works for your organisation) or to work flexible hours – and dealing with flexible working requests in a reasonable way.
• Consider conducting periodic surveys to establish ways of improving employees’ experiences at work. Consultation is key to creating a happy workforce.
• Train your managers to identify and support employees who may be suffering from a mental health issue, including stress, anxiety and depression. Providing training to managers on the legal basics of discrimination and reasonable adjustments, as well as on how to manage their teams and have potentially difficult conversations, can make a world of difference.

Conclusion

Employers will see benefits by taking proactive steps to promote good mental health at work. Employees with good mental health are likely to be more productive, motivated and have higher attendance. Employers who can demonstrate that they have made reasonable adjustments for unwell employees can also make successful claims against them much less likely.

If you are an employer seeking advice on supporting your staff and their mental health, get in touch using our contact form or contact Rachel on rford-evans@darwingray.com or 029 2082 9120 to find out how we can help you.