Dougal Sutherland: The need for mental health support in the workplace, the financial cost of cutting it

2024 was a hard year for many. If you didn’t lose your job, you might have spent a lot of time worrying about losing your job or ending up in the unenviable position of trying to do more with less! It’s not surprising that there are high rates of anxiety, stress, and burnout in the workforce.

However, at the same time I’ve noticed over the past 12 months a bit of a worrying trend in workplaces to dial back on things that support staff mental health and wellbeing. There are some suggestions this is because in a tighter economic environment that these topics are seen as “nice to haves” or a bit “soft and fluffy” and therefore should be dialled back.

This new survey from the UK highlighted that if businesses understood staff mental health and wellbeing from a different perspective, they would quickly realise that it’s more important than ever to invest in staff wellbeing. Could it be that protecting and enhancing the mental wellbeing of workers is the key to increasing our productivity, something that is on the minds of many this year?

The Deloitte’s survey looked at the financial sector and found there was more symptoms of burnout compared to other areas of industry and the cost of this was over $10k per person per year.

If we dive into what those symptoms are —exhaustion, making more mistakes at work, poorer work performance— then it’s easy to see how poor mental health can affect the productivity of a business. Also, in some workplaces being exhausted and making more mistakes at work could lead to some potentially fatal consequences (e.g., mistakes with machinery).

Other research has demonstrated that businesses who are supporting the mental health of their employees have lower levels of sick leave and better financial performance. Helpful to know in light of the WHO data indicating that globally about 12 billion working days per year are lost due to depression and anxiety, which costs over $1.7 trillion annually!

So, what can businesses and staff do? I think the first thing is to change how you think the reasons for supporting people’s mental health at work. If you can figure out what is contributing to poor wellbeing at your place and do something to address it, you’re putting your business in a really good position to weather the next 12months which, by all predictions, are still going to be somewhat rocky.

For people in the workplace, you might have already found that requests for support for mental health and wellbeing have fallen on deaf ears. You might want to subtly change how you frame these requests, by asking for support to help maintain the viability and productivity of your organisation.

On a more meta level, the government, in its current push for more efficiency and productivity, might be really interested in this data and to think about how protecting and supporting workers’ mental health could be a win:win situation.

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