Amrit Sandhar, CEO & Founder, &Evolve says employees want action, not awareness on mental health.
With the economic climate facing so much uncertainty, organisations are tightening their belts and looking at every opportunity to drive efficiencies. But when we look at working efficiently, it raises a big question. What is the reference point? Every organisation seems to go through the same annual cycle, expecting to deliver more with less. Technological advances alone cannot account for the savings being asked. Hard-working employees are rewarded with higher targets and fewer resources. And whilst those same organisations introduce wellbeing policies and tell people not to work after hours or send emails over the weekend, the inevitable truth is that unless many of them do, there is no way to bring those workloads down.
So, another Mental Health Awareness Week and Month arrives, and with it, the familiar rhythm of activity. Lunchtime webinars. Posters in the staff kitchen. A heartfelt LinkedIn post from the CEO. A fresh cohort signed up to mental health first aider training. In most cases the intent is sincere. The trouble is that we have been doing some version of this for more than a decade now, and on almost every measure that matters, the picture is not improving.
Awareness without action
Mental Health UK’s 2026 Burnout Report, drawn from YouGov polling of more than 4,500 UK adults, captures the disconnect with uncomfortable clarity. Just 27% of workers feel that mental health is genuinely prioritised and supported through action and resources in their workplace. Almost one in three say their employer raises awareness, but managers lack the time, training and resources to do anything meaningful with it. One in five workers took time off in the last year because of stress-related poor mental health, rising to almost two in five among 18 to 24 year olds. That is what awareness without action looks like from the inside.
Zoom out, and the macro picture is no better. The WHO and ILO estimate that 12 billion working days are lost globally each year to depression and anxiety, at a cost of around $1 trillion in lost productivity. Deloitte UK’s 2024 Mental Health and Employers report put the annual cost to UK employers alone at £51 billion, with presenteeism the single largest contributor. So why does the dial refuse to move?
I think we have spent ten years confidently solving the wrong problem. We have built an architecture of awareness. We have signposted EAPs, certified mental health first aiders, lit up offices in green for the week, and trained everyone to look out for the signs. What we have not been willing to do, on the whole, is interrogate how the work itself is designed, and how it is being asked of the people doing it.
This is the quiet conversation employees are having when their managers leave the room. They notice that, in the same week as the burnout webinar, three colleagues left the team and the workload was simply absorbed by those who remained. They notice that the inbox does not stop when they take a week off – so emails get checked from the sun lounger, just to soften the dread of returning on a Sunday night to hundreds of unread messages. They notice that flexibility tends to flow in one direction, with work creeping into the evenings, the weekends and the family dinner, but rarely the other way round. The cynicism this breeds is not aimed at mental health support itself. It is aimed at the gap between what the organisation says and what it actually does.
For all the talk of AI rewriting the future of work, the numbers tell a sobering story too. According to the ONS, the average weekly hours of full-time UK staff have barely shifted in a decade. We are working roughly the same number of formal hours as before, but with thinner teams, higher expectations and a digital tether that follows us into the dining room. The maths is brutal. That extra capacity is being conjured from somewhere, and the somewhere is the personal time of loyal employees who, out of commitment, are quietly absorbing the gap.
Be brave enough to put the wellbeing strategy and the workforce plan on the same page, in front of the same executives, in the same conversation.”
If we are honest, we have allowed the wellbeing strategy and the workforce planning strategy to live in entirely different rooms. They are written by different teams, championed by different executives, and almost never sit on the same agenda. We invest in mindfulness apps while signing off resource plans that mathematically guarantee burnout. We talk about sustainable performance while operating with single points of failure across every critical function in the business.
This is not a failure of intent. It is a failure of structural courage.
The gradual descent
A race to the bottom is a fair way of describing where many of us have ended up, because no single CEO sat down one Tuesday and decided to engineer a culture in which people answer emails from their holiday villa. It happened gradually. Every organisation is benchmarking itself against the next one. Every cost line is being squeezed against last year. The result is a system in which everybody is running faster, nobody is meaningfully ahead, and the cost is being absorbed silently by the nervous systems of our employees.
What employees are asking for this Mental Health Awareness Month is not more awareness. It is for someone, somewhere in the building, to do the harder thing – to look at the work, not just the worker. To ask whether the roles we have designed are actually doable in the contracted hours. To ask whether ‘always on’ has quietly crept in as an unspoken expectation. To ask whether the goodwill of loyal colleagues has become a permanent operating model rather than a temporary stretch. To ask, plainly, whether holiday is really holiday in your business, or just a different location from which to keep half an eye on the inbox.
These are leadership questions before they are HR questions. So my challenge for this Mental Health Awareness Month is a simple one. Spend less time campaigning, and more time examining. Be brave enough to put the wellbeing strategy and the workforce plan on the same page, in front of the same executives, in the same conversation. Look honestly at what your business model is asking of people, and whether the goodwill plugging the gap can keep doing so indefinitely. Because if we do not, employees will continue to draw their own conclusions about which strategy the organisation truly believes in.
And when the engagement scores slip, when sickness absence climbs, when the people we cannot afford to lose start handing in their notices, we will not be able to claim we did not know. We will only be able to claim that we chose awareness over action.
