Workplace mental health: fix the work, not just the people

Procedures rarely describe the whole job. Look at interruptions, trade-offs, targets, deadlines, tools, staffing levels and dealings with the public. Employees know where work gets stuck and which rules they bend to hit their targets: what they say is the raw material of any assessment.

To make sense of what comes up, a practical grid comes from INRS, which sorts psychosocial risk factors into six groups:

• work intensity and working hours: pace constraints, unrealistic targets, non-standard hours;
• emotional demands, especially when facing suffering or distress;
• lack of autonomy and of decision latitude;
• poor working relationships, which also cover career prospects and organizational fairness;
• value conflicts, when what the job demands clashes with professional, social or personal values;
• job insecurity, whether socio-economic or caused by changes nobody controls.

The grid keeps the conversation away from individual fragility. It also serves a legal duty. Across the EU, the Framework Directive 89/391/EEC requires employers to assess and control risks at work, and EU-OSHA presents it as the legal basis for managing psychosocial risks. In France, INRS adds, they belong in the company’s mandatory written risk assessment, the document unique, alongside every other risk.

Each group of factors calls for a decision about how work is organized. Those decisions are the heart of the action plan.

Work intensity and hours

Make trade-offs visible: when two targets conflict, say which one comes first. Adjust resources and deadlines instead of expecting people to be always available. Hours matter too: our guide to sleep and shift work covers the levers on rosters and after-hours messages.

Emotional demands

In jobs that deal with the public or with distress, prepare for difficult situations. For aggression from customers or the public, France’s INRS recommends training teams to handle conflict and making it possible to call in a third person. After a distressing event, nobody is left alone, and the team goes back over what happened to understand how it came about.

Autonomy

Give people a real say over the order of tasks, methods and organization. Autonomy without resources, or without the option to say no, simply becomes one more responsibility.

Relationships, support and recognition

Train managers to deal with conflict and make routes for raising concerns clear. Explain assessment criteria, give regular feedback and recognize invisible work. Support shows in everyday decisions more than in speeches.

Value conflicts

Create a safe way to say that good-quality work has become impossible, or that a request goes against professional ethics. It only helps if speaking up is protected.

Change and insecurity

Involve teams early in change, explain the decision, train people on new tools and plan time to learn. A change imposed without that time adds to the workload just as it reshuffles it.

A manager may notice a change: fatigue, mistakes, withdrawal, tension. Managers do not diagnose. They can open a conversation based on facts, look at what has changed in the work, and refer the person to occupational health or another qualified professional. For the first time, the WHO guidelines on mental health at work published in 2022 recommend manager training, to build their capacity to prevent stressful work environments and respond to workers in distress.

Manager training, helplines, support for an employee who is struggling, return to work: all of these are needed, and none of them replaces action on the causes. We explain how they fit together in our article on primary, secondary and tertiary prevention.

In an emergency

An awareness campaign does not tell anyone what to do when a risk is immediate. The procedure must be known in advance: who to call, who alerts occupational health, who stays with the person. Make sure everyone knows the emergency number and the national crisis line in each country where you operate. In the United States, 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, is free, confidential and available around the clock by call, text or chat. In France, 3114, the national suicide prevention line, is free and open 24/7, including to colleagues worried about someone.

INRS describes a five-step approach that works well beyond France.

1. Prepare. Senior management makes an explicit commitment to act on how work is organized. A working group brings together management, employees, employee representatives, HR and occupational health. INRS recommends agreeing the rules of the process with employee representatives, or with employees directly, and committing to protect what interviewees say.
2. Analyze work situations. Combine interviews, observation, aggregated HR data, incidents, absence, staff turnover and recent changes. Rank factors, not symptoms.
3. Build the action plan. Actions on how work is organized, each with an owner and a deadline, backed by whatever individual support is needed.
4. Implement. With the planned resources and timeline, and tied to decisions on operations, staffing and transformation rather than running alongside them.
5. Monitor and evaluate. Report back to employees, adjust, and update the risk assessment.

EU-OSHA makes the same point: workers and their representatives understand best what can go wrong in their workplace, and involving them is a success factor. A survey can feed the assessment, but it is not an exact thermometer: the tool chosen, the response rate and people’s trust in anonymity all shape the results. Don’t launch a survey without planning how you will share the findings and act on them.

An app can give access to resources or support a follow-up the employee chooses. It must never send a manager an individual stress, mood or fatigue score: France’s data protection authority, the CNIL, states that employers cannot access their employees’ health data. The safeguards to demand (genuinely voluntary participation, aggregated indicators on large enough groups, no use for performance management) are covered in our article on employee health privacy.

With MyTwin for employers, the organization can offer mental health among its prevention modules. Employees who want to can follow a personal pathway, coordinated by a MyTwin physician or by the company’s own medical team; the employer only sees aggregated results. That pathway comes on top of action on how work is organized, never instead of it.

Track what changes in the work first: staffing, roster stability, overtime, decision latitude, pain points resolved and how fast, participation in change. Add experience indicators collected anonymously, such as perceived workload or access to support.

Absence and turnover depend on many factors, so their trend alone does not prove that an initiative works. Our guide to measure a workplace health program explains how to build indicators and why a return on investment announced without a comparative method deserves caution. Whatever the results, share them with employees.