With rising awareness of the impact of mental health in the workplace, L&D professionals are perfectly placed to make a difference to wellbeing at their organisation.

In this article, we’ll explore the complex causes of poor mental health in the workplace, and identify how learning & development specialists can design training programmes that boost happiness and resilience among employees.

Summary: Poor workplace wellbeing can generate significant hidden costs at any organisation, through loss of effectiveness, absence and staff turnover. So, improving employee mental health should be a top priority: and the good news is that learning & development teams are well-positioned to help!

Awareness training specifically around mental health issues is naturally valuable, but you should bear in mind how internal miscommunication can be a significant cause of ‘stress multipliers’, like isolation, confusion, or sense of threat. For this reason, developing leadership skills in managers and communication skills among staff can play a critical role in reducing workplace stress.

🧠 The causes of mental ill-health at work

Poor mental health can represent a whole range of conditions, from anxiety, depression and burnout to other more complex disorders.

It’s no surprise, then, that the causes can be multi-faceted also, and of course many of these have their roots outside the workplace. These might include underlying biological factors, a history of trauma, or out-of-work stressors in our personal lives.

Either way, it’s obvious that our work lives have a big part to play in our mental health. Many of us spend over a third of our waking hours at work each week, and it contains a rich emotional stew of success, failure, adversity, uncertainty, comradeship and conflict. Even when our mental health is being challenged by factors outside of the office, the workplace can still be the arena in which these difficulties most visibly bubble to the surface.

💸 Employer costs of poor workplace wellbeing

Poor mental health poses a significant burden both to the individual and to businesses and society as a whole. It’s estimated that poor mental health costs UK employers £45 billion each year.

This is evidenced at work by rising absenteeism, with nearly 18 million workdays lost in 2019/20, while working when ill (presenteeism) contributes to lost productivity.

Promoting positive wellbeing and mental health at work is the right thing to do – both ethically and economically. In fact, a recent investigation by Deloitte and MIND revealed that the ROI for workplace mental health support is a huge 5:1.

🔗 The link between work, stress, and mental health

Our mental wellbeing at work is not dissimilar to how our physical fitness operates. Our overall level of stress is dependent on a combination of factors: the core amount of work we need to do, the ‘stress multipliers’ that make that work easier or harder, our capacity for sustained work and ‘sprint’ work, and our opportunity to recover and adapt.

🏋🏾 Base workload

All our incoming tasks and responsibilities, inside and outside the workplace, could be seen as the raw ingredients of stress. After all, if we’re constantly overloaded with work to accomplish, we’re a much higher risk of getting stressed. These might include our taskload both inside and outside of the workplace.

But not all work is created equally stressful…

❌ Stress multipliers

If you had a lot of straightforward, interesting work to get on with, you might get a lot done, and even rather enjoy it – a flow state.

On the other hand, sometimes a relatively small amount of work – even a single dreaded email! – can cause a disproportionate amount of psychological stress. So clearly, there must be aggravating anti-factors that make some potatoes hotter than others. These factors can include:

• Lack of psychological safety: typically manifesting as fear of failure, work that feels high-stakes, where we are not adequately supported, are worried about getting ‘in trouble’, or feeling like our identity and reputation is on the line

• Lack of purpose or motivation: it’s much more stressful to execute work if the project itself feels meaningless, ill-intentioned, or doomed from the outset

• Unfamiliarity: work that we are not familiar with is more stressful, as we need to exercise a lot more conscious effort, and there is increased uncertainty – we might not yet be able to tell if we’re doing it right, or if the correct standard has been reached

• Isolation: most problems are worsened by a sense of separation from others; when we can’t commiserate, laugh with, or seek support from other people, it can magnify the sense of threat, guilt or anxiety around any issue. This can be aggravated by remote/hybrid work, distant or hard-to-reach managers, or cliquey or discriminatory workplace behaviour

• Emotive work: some work, especially involving other people, is naturally more high-stress, if the employee has to deal with unhappy, challenging, or high-conflict situations

• Stress-about-the-stress: at a certain point, rising stress itself can become a stress multiplier; for instance when it inhibits our ability to ‘know where to start’ or perform tasks that require a relaxed-type of confidence. (If you have ever felt your nerves skyrocket at the sound of your own quavering voice in the speech, you’ll know this loop!)

The multiplying effect of these factors can far exceed the variance in underlying workload. For instance, “having too much to do” is only part of the puzzle; the “consequences of not doing it” are the other. Reflecting on this list (and all the other things that could be easily added to it) should already start to indicate the many different ways a learning and development programme might help.

It’s also worth emphasising that stress factors are inherently subjective: an experience that is stressful for one person may not be stressful for another, and an encounter that might not be intended to be stressful may nevertheless have that effect.

For instance, some companies expect managers to avoid requesting meetings with subordinates using vague titles like ‘Quick chat’, because the ambiguity over the topic can unintentionally generate high levels of stress in the invitee, even though 99% of the ‘quick chats’ are simple progress updates, slight tweaks to working patterns or other harmless topics.

🥵 Coping capacity

Just as we each have a level of baseline fitness, we each have a coping threshold above which psychological stress starts to become unsustainable and unpleasant.

Returning to our analogy from the body: when we sustain a hard pace of physical effort, our bodies start to generate energy ‘anaerobically’, a short-term solution that causes lactic acid to build up in the muscles and quickly leads to a sense of aching exhaustion, requiring an appropriate period of recovery.

Although there are genetic factors underpinning this, our coping capacity can both improve or deteriorate over time, or even day-to-day. For instance, a lack of sleep, missed meals, or a turbulent day at home will all temporarily reduce both our ability to tolerate stress.

🌀 Maladaptive coping strategies and capacity spirals

As we run low on energy, we tend to resort to more instinctual, comfort behaviours for short-term relief, but ironically for most of us, these behaviours are not always that restorative. For instance, if we’ve dog-tired from a bad night’s sleep, we’re much less likely to do other healthy, resilience-boosting things like eat something healthy or go for a walk outside. Instead, we just want to eat pizza on the couch - and who can blame us?

Similarly, if we’re overloaded cognitively, we’re less likely to have a nourishing or curious conversation with our collaborator, instead tending to block ourselves off or getting decidedly curt.

In this sense, our coping capacity can end up being somewhat less than expected - as stress increases, our healthy coping-boosters can start to fall away, actually reducing our overall stress budget, in a negative spiral. Fortunately, there are conscious techniques we can learn to interrupt these patterns and restore some equilibrium.

🙅🏻‍♀️What is burnout?

When a certain quantity of work is multiplied by powerful stress factors, it may begin to exceed our coping capacity.

Just as with physical exertion, in the short term this may simply manifest as acute discomfort, like feeling exhausted, overwhelmed or plain stressed-out. Nevertheless, with sufficient recovery time, we live to fight another day. And indeed, if the outcome is rewarding enough, the sense of accomplishment may outweigh the jangled nerves along the way!

More dangerous, though, is chronic overload, where we repeatedly exceed our coping capacity, without sufficient time to adapt or recover. Each time leaves us a little more frazzled than before, and although the effects may accumulate gradually, we will start to experience escalating systemic symptoms such as dread, fatigue, insomnia, low mood, permanent anxiety, and so on. This is burnout, and can take weeks if not months to recover from.

⚠️ Signs your organisation may have wellbeing issues

There are many signals that wellbeing and mental health at your workplace may be declining:

• Teams are struggling to deliver the same quantity of work as usual, for unclear reasons

• The results of employee engagement surveys indicate deteriorating satisfaction

• There are unusually high (or rising) rates of employee absence

• People are leaving for equivalent roles in other organisations, rather more senior opportunities

• Stress or burnout are mentioned as factors in exit interviews

• Your employer brand, such as reviews on Glassdoor, is in decline

You should regularly monitor all these channels to maintain steady awareness of

💭 How can learning & development support mental health and wellbeing at work?

By now, it should be obvious that learning & development teams can play a massive role at all three levels: increasing capacity, reducing stress factors, and encouraging a healthier workload. Although specific training focused on mental health & wellbeing can form a central part of this, there is a huge role in addressing other workplace dynamics that innocently but massively exacerbate stress.

Research studies have found reducing job stress at multiple levels – both individually (dealing with problems at source and improving skills) and organisationally (policy & procedure) are more effective than single measures.

Measures like flexible working can pay for themselves in terms of reduced absence and staff turnover. Hybrid working policies, like PwC’s condensed summer working hours, are making a big impact on general wellbeing. There is also a strong link between poor mental health and discrimination. People who experience prejudice and bias, for example, those in the LGBT+ or Black community, are at greater risk. Championing an inclusive culture backed by policies and people management practices that promote understanding, fairness, and respect for difference will help reduce stigma and promote wellbeing.

Turning our ‘stress multipliers’ upside-down, it’s easy to identify the dynamics we want to foster:

• A feeling of community and inclusion

• An open and honest atmosphere, without fear of judgement

• The trust we will still be treated with human decency even if we fail at a task

• Appreciation and visibility of the work we do

• A sense of value and purpose in the work, whether that’s intellectual satisfaction or a larger goal

• Clarity and certainty around ‘where we stand’, what needs to happen and what happens if it doesn’t

• Sufficient time, resources and skills that give us confidence our work is possible

• A sense of a bigger journey that connects day-to-day work with a career path

• Opportunities to learn and grow

• Autonomy to work in a way that suits us in alignment with our natural energies

• A sense of structure, or ‘safety barriers’ that protect us from frightening consequences

• Sufficient space and time to fully and deeply recover from intense work

Let’s work backwards through our stress model to look at 6 key training interventions L&D teams can use to improve workplace mental health.

1. Improve mental health awareness

This plays two key roles:

• Creates a more open workplace culture for discussion. Mental health awareness training is an important way of signalling that your culture takes these factors seriously, and that they’re A-OK to talk about. This will of course be reassuring for anyone experiencing clinical levels of mental illness, or returning from an absence, but it also enables employees to bring relevant language into our day-to-day conversations, and deal with the ups-and-downs of psychological wellbeing collectively. “This task seems fine, but for some reason, I’ve noticed giving a huge amount of anxiety. Can we try to figure out why?” This in turn reduces isolation, which is itself a huge stress multiplier.

• Creates a more conscious, observant approach to our own mental health. Our physical sensations are quite intuitive, but nevertheless it would be risky to start a workout regime without understanding what muscles are, that some are stronger than others, that they develop over time, that they require rest to recover, and so on. For instance, most of us are vaguely aware that lifting heavy objects should be performed in a certain way, and it’s not just about simply ‘pushing through’ and ‘just getting on with it’. Or, imagine if we experienced tired legs halfway through a marathon as a huge source of shame and embarrassment!

Training course: Mental Health Awareness

This warm, conversational two-hour session for 4 - 15 employees is designed to explore how mental health intersects with our work lives, reduce stigma around mental health issues, and celebrate techniques we can support our colleagues and ourselves.

Training course: Managing for mental health

A mini training course for line managers, with up to three two-hour sessions. It’s designed to develop leaders’ ability to support mental wellbeing in their teams, and empower them to respond empathetically to mental health issues if they arise.

By bringing mental health into the conversation at your workplace, you provide new language for people to observe and reflect upon their current status, and make more thoughtful decisions moment-to-moment.

In short, we want to grow the framework from one that’s purely focused on the existence of mental illness (or a ‘fine’/’depressed’ duality) to a more nuanced fitness-like spectrum from ‘peak performance’ to ‘low-baseline’ to ‘actual illness’.

2. Building capacity with resilience

Our coping capacity provides an upper-limit on how much stress we can sustainably encounter, and learning and development can aim to gently increase this capacity among its people.

Resilience training can be helpful in interrupting negative thought patterns that begin to emerge under high stress environments.

Meanwhile, a counterpart in physical resilience, even for those in non-physical work, can encourage more nourishing recovery behaviours. Just as coaches of elite athletes take a holistic view of competitors technique, fitness, mindset and nutrition, there is nothing wrong in providing additional support to your employees lifestyle from a resilience standpoint.

Training course: building resilience – background & basics

A two-hour training session on the fundamentals of developing inner resilience in challenging circumstances.

Training course: building mental resilience

A deeper dive into the conscious and subconscious psychology of resilient thinking and behaviour, in a two-hour workshop that gets people talking and sharing.

Training course: building physical resilience

This training session goes beyond the mind, to explore the science of how our bodies influence our mental health. This two-hour, expert-led session empowers employees to take a holistic approach to their own resilience and grow their capacity for meeting challenges from the body out.

Mindfulness training is also a powerful technique to generate ‘bubbles of calm’ under provocative conditions.

Although far from a total solution, mindfulness approaches are an effective way to create mental breathing room, allowing us to recentre and make more thoughtful choices. In turn, this can reduce ‘stress about the stress’ and interrupt negative feedback loops.

Training course: Mindfulness at work

In this bite-sized training course, led by a mental health expert, participants learn to make use of mindfulness methods to enhance their concentration, creativity and mental wellbeing.

However, as we’ve previously noted, we don’t really want our employees to spend too much time in ‘the red zone’ in the first place. Let’s look to managers and how our organisation works to try and eliminate ‘stress multipliers.’

3. Improving management

Management makes a huge difference to our wellbeing at work.

But it’s not only the stereotype of a thundering, mercurial boss that poses a risk to wellbeing. In reality – because we’re all different – no single management type works for everyone.

For instance, consider a well-intentioned, laissez-faire manager who only rarely delivers feedback, and usually only if something is going badly wrong. While some might happily thrive under this regime (especially those who are familiar with their leadership style) other employees might flounder.

The manager’s laidback tendency might increase a nagging sense of uncertainty among those who need more reassurance; meanwhile, because the manager only speaks up when there’s bad news, it could create the impression that they’re actually more unhappy than they really are. This, in turn, could dissuade the employees from speaking up or reaching out for support. Now we have some employees experiencing increasing levels of stress over a fairly innocuous menu of tasks.

Obviously, though, this scenario isn’t a simple case of an incompetent manager or oversensitive employee, but there is nevertheless a misreading in the relationship that’s creating an unnecessary stress multiplier. Training on both sides of the equation can create more mutual understanding, and expand a flexible repertoire of approaches that different people can take to generate additional psychological safety based on their leadership type. What works for Aslï might not work for Bob.

At BiteSize Learning, we offer a suite of two-hour training sessions to develop managers. Some that are particularly apt to increase wellbeing are…

Training course: Leadership styles

This session helps managers adopt a variety of different management styles depending on the situation and the capacity of their reports, giving them more flexibility to respond to issues in the manner that’s most effective.

Training course: Managing change

Change and the uncertainty it brings can be major drivers of workplace stress. This bitesize training course empowers managers to sensitively help their teams to adjust to new responsibilities, expectations or ways of working.

Training course: managing difficult conversations

Negative feedback can be difficult to deliver, but whether managers avoid it altogether, procrastinate having the conversation or make the feedback confrontational or unclear, the results can actually make things worse. We give managers the confidence to have clear, open and supportive conversations that improve performance without triggering anxiety, defensiveness or withdrawal.

Training course: building and leading great teams

Teamwork makes the dream work, but dysfunctional teams can have a decidedly negative effect on workplace wellbeing. In this bitesize training course we boost managers’ ability to create healthy and collaborative behaviours in the teams they lead.

4. Supporting all employees

Effectiveness training needn’t only be for managers. It’s really helpful for learning & development specialists to encourage employees to communicate effectively, discuss difficult issues, seek clarity and support, and process feedback without feeling excessively stressed out by it. Some training interventions that might help include…

Training course: managing upwards

This two-hour training session give employees the tools and confidence to effectively engage managers to discuss important issues, raise emerging problems, get clarity on confusing challenges and find solutions to challenges – all crucial to feeling supported and motivated at work. Ideal for organisations where people are hesitating to speak up.

Training course: giving & receiving feedback

We train people at all levels on creating a healthy and effective feedback culture, where everyone can share their perspectives openly without defensiveness or hurt feelings, while still creating clarity and letting people know where they stand.

Training course: time management

Time management isn’t just about ‘getting more done.’ This two-hour training course empowers staff to prioritise, defend their schedules, consider their energy levels, and choose how they spend their time more consciously: all behaviours that help support workplace mental health.

You might also consider some other learning & development interventions on the individual contributor level:

• Provide better training in the day-to-day duties of their job so they feel more confident and capable

• Make training available that allows employees to develop additional skills that contribute to their career development

• Consider how well-paced and effective your onboarding process is, in terms of avoiding overwhelm, generating psychological safety, creating a sense of integration and purpose, and setting new employees up for success.

  • Reflect upon different personality types, and what the key drivers of safety each experiences: for example, some people may benefit from ‘getting stuck in’ early on to build confidence, others may want to spend longer understanding the big picture before they feel ready

• If you provide a personal discretionary training budget for employees, consider making a portion available for an activity that’s totally removed from their everyday job role; something that will be fully absorbing and guarantee they are utterly distracted from work

  • For instance, if an employee is a number-crunching analyst working remotely from home, perhaps they could expense some collaborative cooking lessons that get them off the laptop, out of the house and with other people, doing something tactile and enriching!

5. Consider diversity & inclusion

Exclusive, unfriendly or disrespectful workplaces are obviously extremely stressful places to operate in, and discrimination is an acceptable cause of stress in professional environments. Although mental health issues can affect anyone, it should be a cause of alarm if these symptoms are clustered in certain demographics.

Training course: respect at work

In this session, our expert trainers help attendees explore the qualities and behaviours that earn respect in the workplace, driving a culture that is a great place to work.

You should also consider how economic conditions affect staff differently, especially junior employees on lower salaries. These individuals will be consistently exposed to additional stressors that senior leaders may too easily forget:

• High out-of-work stress from cost-of-living crisis

• Less likely to have effective work-from-home space

• Can be financially excluded from participating in work social occasions, such as after-work drinks

• Can find out-of-pocket work expenses highly stressful (for instance if employees are expected to cover certain costs up-front, and only receive reimbursement several weeks later)

• May not be able to afford out-of-work wellbeing-boosters like the healthiest eating options, gym memberships, and so on

• Could experience heightened stress from any perceived threat to job security, such as negative feedback or organisational restructures, due to lack of financial stability in the face of possible unemployment

Undoubtedly, your compensation strategy should be the priority area for ameliorating these issues, but nevertheless you should review all your workplace policies and programmes from the perspective of your least-remunerated staff to ensure your assumptions are accessible to all.

6. Ensure hybrid working is working for you

“While hybrid working offers wellbeing benefits, there are potential disadvantages that need addressing. Protective factors such as opportunities for growth, recognition, communication, feeling part of a team and supportive workplace relationships are all interrupted when people work remotely. So leaders need to be more proactive, and need to know how to manage hybrid employees and create an environment which supports wellbeing.”

Paul Hodder, Director, BiteSize Learning

Like many organisations, you may have altered your working patterns and practices in the last few years.

The new world of hybrid and remote work has given employees increased autonomy and flexibility, and much reduced the psychological toll of commuting – which is all great news from a wellbeing standpoint.

However, we’re collectively still getting to grips with the more nuanced impacts on team morale, collaboration and knowledge-sharing, and how distributed teams can most effectively maintain healthy dynamics along these dimensions.

So, this is yet another opportunity for learning & development teams to provide extra resources that enhance employees’ ability to make the most of flexible working, while still feeling supported as part of a team.

Training course: leading hybrid teams

Line managing remote & hybrid employees calls for enhanced management skills, often requiring a more deliberate approach to engaging staff in lieu of a more improvisational approach. This training course develops these skills in managers moving to a hybrid work model.

Training course: wellbeing in a hybrid world

From extra me-time to less face-time, the move to hybrid and fully-remote working patterns offers new possibilities and new challenges for our mental health & wellbeing. Our two-hour training session helps employees identify the dynamics in play and the actions they can take to best support themselves as working styles continue to evolve.

💭 Some final thoughts

So, as an L&D professional, you have a real opportunity to make employees at your workplace not just more effective, but healthier and happier too. Aside from the feel-good factor, you’ll also be saving your organisation substantial costs, and can expect your interventions to return on their investment several times over.

Research tells us that investment in prevention, from enhanced management skills to resilient thinking, is substantially more effective than dealing with critically poor wellbeing after the fact. So, even if you’re yet to see the signals of poor mental health in your workplace, the right time to act is now.

Want to learn more? Explore all our training courses or contact us.