In my role as visiting professor at Aston University, I am invited twice every year to a symposium where those who have accepted this role are invited to lead discussions on key issues affecting the business community.
As someone who did his PhD research in technology entrepreneurship thirty years ago, it’s an honour to be able to support my alma mater in this way, especially given the quality of the other visiting professors who include founders of FTSE 100 businesses, chief executives of major UK organisations and successful entrepreneurs.
This time I was asked to lead a discussion not on small business or entrepreneurship as expected but on a subject that has been of particular interest to me over the last 12 months, namely mental health in the workplace.
My co-presenter was the amazing Sir Rod Aldridge, one of the UK’s leading social and business entrepreneurs with a career that has spanned senior roles in the public sector, business, and the voluntary sector.
Back in 1984, he set up the Capita Group, which he built from a start-up in 1984 to becoming a FTSE 100 company that today employs over 60,000 people and which shaped the outsourcing market in the UK.
Rod is also the chairman of (and investor in) Frog Systems, a new award-winning business which focuses on addressing and solving mental health in the workplace and was founded in the belief that everyone should have early access to stories of hope and relevant support before reaching a point of crisis.
So what are the factors impacting on mental health in the workplace? The World Health Organisation defines several areas including under-use of skills or being under-skilled for work, lack of control over job design or workload as well as job insecurity, inadequate pay, or poor investment in career development.
Also, excessive workloads or work pace, long, unsocial, or inflexible hours, organisational culture that enables negative behaviours, and limited support from colleagues or authoritarian supervision can lead to significant issues.
There is also increasing evidence that this is no longer a fringe issue with the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Mental Health and Work report showing that at any one time, 1 in 6 people of the working age population of Britain experience symptoms associated with mental ill health. In addition, the 2022 Deloitte UK Mental Health Report reported that 50% of employees have experienced at least one characteristic of burn out due to greater job demands and expectations, lack of social interaction and lack of boundaries between work and home life.
The CIPD’s Good Work Index stated that 46% of workers have said they’ve worked despite not feeling physically or mentally well enough to perform their duties and the Health and Safety Executive showed there were 0.9 million work-related stress, depression or anxiety cases in 2021/22 with 17 million days lost as a result.
Given this, are organisations taking this seriously in the UK? Unfortunately not, and the CIPD study reported that only half of UK organisations take a strategic approach to employee wellbeing with nearly one in five not currently doing anything to improve employee health and wellbeing.
Only 41% of respondents expected their organisation’s health and wellbeing budget to increase over the next 12 months. In fact, other studies have shown that one in four businesses spend absolutely nothing on specific wellbeing support for their workforce.
The result of a lack of focus on mental health within the workplace is starkly seen in the impact on global and the UK economy, with the World Health Organisation estimating that with 15% of working-age adults globally estimated to have a mental disorder, this has resulted in 12 billion working days being lost every year to depression and anxiety at a cost of US$ 1 trillion per year in lost productivity.
Deloitte estimated that in the UK, the annual cost of poor mental health could be as high as £56bn with three quarters of this in private businesses and probably has a larger effect than other key factors affecting productivity including innovation, skills and technology. More importantly in an environment where there is a constant battle for skilled employees, recruitment and talent retention has become the number one reason for wellbeing investment.
So how to address this? We proposed that a health and wellness index should be created for FTSE 100 companies and that health and wellness should be integrated into annual reporting for businesses in the same way that environmental, social and governance (ESG) has been in recent years.
It was also suggested that all organisations should be encouraged to sign a “commitment to better mental health at work” charter and create a best practice example in mental health and wellness at work that can be shared by organisations.
However, all of this starts with the commitment of senior managers to improve health and wellbeing within individual organisations.
During the last few months here in Wales, we have seen national organisations such as the Welsh Rugby Union, S4C and Plaid Cymru fail to do this with serious consequences for their employees.
And I believe other organisations will soon have to answer for their actions in not dealing with issues such as bullying and a failure to support staff dealing with mental health problems. In particular, this prevalence of getting employees who have been bullied to sign non-disclosure agreements to shut them up about problems in the workplace rather than dealing with the problem at hand has to stop.
Given that the Welsh Government is committed to fair work practices in the workplace, especially in supporting health and wellbeing, it must act immediately if any further evidence comes to light of this type of practice within Welsh organisations that receive funding from them. Not only is the right thing to do for individual employees but it will have a major impact on productivity here in Wales.
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