From Awareness Days to Real Change: Is Workplace Wellbeing Still Just Lip Service?

Over the last few years, the way we talk about mental health at work has changed dramatically. Since Covid, we’ve seen more mental health awareness days, wellbeing webinars and Mental Health First Aiders.

Awareness is unquestionably higher and stigma is lower than it was a decade ago. But has all this talk actually shifted how people feel and function at work?

The data suggests: not nearly enough.

What the latest UK data says about stress and sickness

Recent Health and Safety Executive (HSE) statistics for Great Britain show:

• 33.7 million working days were lost in 2023/24 due to work-related ill health and non-fatal injuries.[1]
• 29.6 million of those days were due to work-related ill health alone.[1]
• Stress, depression or anxiety accounted for 16.4 million days lost – the single largest contributor.[1]
• People off with stress, depression or anxiety took on average 21.1 days off per case.[1]

Longer-term HSE trends show that while physical injuries have fallen, work-related ill health – particularly stress and mental health – has not seen the same sustained improvement.[2]

At a wider labour market level, long-term sickness (including mental health conditions) remains high compared with pre-pandemic levels, with around 2.8 million people economically inactive due to long-term sickness in Q3 2025.[3]

In other words:

• We’re talking more about mental health
• But stress, anxiety and long-term sickness are still taking a heavy toll

That gap matters. It suggests that awareness alone is not enough to turn the ship.

Awareness, wellbeing washing and the limits of campaigns

Campaigns and awareness days have done important work in reducing stigma and encouraging people to speak up. But they can only go so far on their own.

Commentators have started to talk about “wellbeing washing” – when organisations publicly advocate for mental health but fail to back it up with meaningful changes to workload, culture and support.[4][5]

It can look like:

• Posting about World Mental Health Day while average workloads quietly increase
• Running occasional lunchtime webinars, pressuring people to “lunch and learn” rather than take a break
• Promoting Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs) on posters, but rarely talking about them and making them hard to find, hard to access, or emotionally risky to use
• Making it hard or uncomfortable to take annual leave or sick leave, or even just lunch breaks
• Publishing AI-generated wellbeing comms with little thought of the output and how insincere it comes across 

From the employees’ perspective, the message becomes confusing:

“You’re telling me to look after my mental health… but the way we work still feels unsustainable.”

Awareness is a starting point. But without changing how work is designed and led, people are being asked to cope better with the same conditions.

From awareness to psychological fitness at work (COM-B)

To think about what needs to change, it can help to use a simple behaviour change lens such as COM-B (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation → Behaviour).

The question is no longer only:

“Do people know mental health matters?”

It becomes:

“Can people actually behave differently at work in ways that support wellbeing – and does our system make that possible?”

To move towards genuine psychological fitness at work, organisations need to:

Build Capability

• Managers need practical skills to:
  • Spot early signs of overload or distress (in themselves and others!)
  • Have human, boundaried conversations about workload, performance and wellbeing
  • Navigate sensitive topics like neurodiversity, bereavements, relationship difficulties, trauma or long-term health conditions with care
• HR and People teams need:
  • Frameworks for handling complex cases where mental health, performance and adjustments overlap
  • Confidence in when to explore supportive adjustments, when to seek specialist input, and how to balance risk and compassion

Create Opportunity

Even the most motivated manager cannot support wellbeing if the environment makes healthy behaviour impossible. Opportunity includes:

• Work design: realistic workloads, some control over how and when work is done, and genuine scope to prioritise rather than firefight
• Time and space: room in calendars for 1:1s, check-ins and recovery – not just back-to-back meetings
• Simple access routes to support:
  • EAP and other support clearly signposted
  • Easy, psychologically safe ways to ask for help
  • Processes that don’t require people to “break” before they can access support

Strengthen Motivation

Finally, people need to experience that investing in wellbeing is valued and safe:

• Leaders consistently communicating that health and sustainable performance matter
• Managers seeing that when they protect their team’s wellbeing, it’s recognised, not penalised
• Employees seeing that raising concerns leads to problem-solving, not punishment

When capability, opportunity and motivation align, wellbeing becomes part of how work is done – not an optional extra.

Practical actions for organisations, managers and HR

For organisations and senior leaders

• Audit the gap between your wellbeing narrative and people’s lived experience – use surveys, focus groups and sickness data as a sense check.
• Treat stress and mental health as core health & safety risks, not just HR topics, informed by HSE’s data and management standards.[1][6]
• Invest in leadership and HR capability to change how conversations, decisions and workload are handled day-to-day – not just in more campaigns.

For line managers

• Make support concrete and visible: show people exactly how to access the EAP or other resources, and normalise using them.
• Build simple weekly habits:
  • Start 1:1s with “How is work affecting you at the moment?” and listen properly.
  • Review workload and priorities regularly, not just outputs.
• Model healthy boundaries around availability, email and time off.
• Remember, high performance doesn’t equate to coping well.

For HR and People teams

• Shift from being mainly policy owners to practice partners:
  • Offer case consultation to managers handling complex wellbeing or performance issues.
  • If themes emerge with what managers need support with, consider putting together a helpful training or practical handout. You could refer this to an L&D team or Mindset. 
• Review whether your policies and processes enable early support and flexible responses.

How Mindset can help

At Mindset, we partner with organisations who want to move beyond awareness days towards evidence-based, behaviour-level change in how they work, lead and support people.[7][8]

That can include:

• Bespoke leadership and HR training on psychological fitness at work, COM-B-informed behaviour change, and real-world conversations about mental health, workload and performance.
• Advisory support for complex HR cases, bringing a business psychology lens to situations where mental health, neurodiversity, conflict or culture change are in play.
• Coaching for leaders, HR and wellbeing leads who are carrying significant emotional and organisational responsibility.

If you’re noticing the gap between mental health awareness and actual outcomes in your organisation, this is exactly the space we work in.

We don’t need to go backwards on awareness. Talking more openly about mental health has been a vital progress. But it’s time to build on that momentum:

• Use data honestly: stress and sickness absence are still high.
• Acknowledge where current initiatives amount to “wellbeing washing”.
• Focus on capability, opportunity and motivation so that healthier ways of working become possible.

If you’d like support to:

• Review your current approach to workplace mental health,
• Equip leaders and HR with the skills and frameworks they need, or
• Get an external perspective on complex cases and culture change,

You can find out more about Mindset’s services at mindsetbps.com.