Mental Health Month: What can workplaces do differently?

Mental Health Month arrives with good intentions. Workplaces typically organise a team lunch, invite a guest speaker, share information about their Employee Assistance Program, or run sessions on mindfulness, stress, or resilience.

There can be genuine value in these activities. Mental health education may reduce stigma, wellbeing check-ins can create opportunities for conversation, and reminding employees about professional support can encourage people to use it when they need it.

Problems arise when awareness activities become the workplace mental health strategy rather than one part of it.

Consider someone who's regularly working late because their team is understaffed. Priorities change without warning, deadlines remain fixed, and their manager rarely checks whether the workload is manageable. They attend a lunchtime webinar about managing stress, then return to exactly the same workload.

If you want Mental Health Month to have an impact beyond October, it's worth looking at both sides of workplace mental health: how you support individuals and how the organisation prevents psychological harm in the first place.

Workplace mental health needs more than awareness

Mental health concerns are common in Australia. The Australian Bureau of Statistics' National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing found that 21.5% of Australians aged 16 to 85 experienced a mental disorder during the previous 12 months in 2020 to 2022. Across their lifetime, 42.9% had experienced a mental disorder.

Workplace data adds another important perspective. Safe Work Australia's 2025 statistics show that mental health conditions accounted for 12% of serious workers' compensation claims in 2023–24. These claims increased by 14.7% from the previous year and by 161.1% over the preceding decade. The median time lost for a serious mental health claim was 35.7 weeks.

Of course, workers' compensation data doesn't represent every experience of workplace stress or poor mental health. Our mental health is influenced by many parts of life, including relationships, physical health, finances, caring responsibilities, and personal circumstances. Still, workplaces have considerable influence over what happens during a large part of many people's week. And that influence comes with practical responsibilities.

A mental health day won't resolve chronic understaffing, a meditation session won't clarify a confusing role, and an EAP cannot remove an unreasonable workload.

Individual support still matters, of course, but it needs to sit alongside action on the working conditions themselves.

Start with what your people are experiencing

If you're planning Mental Health Month activities, consider starting with your employees' everyday experience of work.

During a check-in, you could ask whether workloads are achievable within paid hours, priorities are clear, people have enough resources to do their jobs, and employees feel comfortable raising concerns. You can also explore whether people feel supported during organisational change and whether they have reasonable control over how they complete their work.

You may hear answers that aren't particularly comfortable. Employees might tell you that there aren't enough people to complete the work. They may describe managers who communicate poorly, meetings that consume hours without clear purpose, or systems that repeatedly create extra work. Some may say they're reluctant to take leave because they return to an overwhelming backlog.

Listening to those experiences is valuable, but what happens afterwards matters even more.

Safe Work Australia recommends a risk-management approach to psychosocial hazards: identify hazards, assess risks where necessary, implement controls, and review whether those controls are working. Worker consultation forms an important part of that process.³

A psychosocial risk assessment can therefore be a much stronger starting point than choosing a calendar of generic wellbeing activities. It helps you move from asking how stressed people feel to understanding what may be creating or increasing that stress at work.

Make wellbeing check-ins more useful

Regular wellbeing check-ins can give managers and employees space to discuss how things are going. But asking “Are you OK?” isn't enough if the conversation ends there.

A useful check-in can include questions about workload, priorities, support, and barriers. You might ask what currently feels manageable, what's becoming difficult, and what could reasonably be changed.

The manager's role isn't to diagnose a mental health condition or provide therapy. Their role is to listen, understand workplace concerns, respond appropriately, and connect employees with additional support when needed.

If an employee says they're overwhelmed because they're covering two vacant roles, for example, the response shouldn't stop at suggesting the EAP. The EAP may provide valuable confidential support, but the staffing problem still needs attention.

This is where compassionate management and good work design meet. You can care about how someone is feeling while also taking practical responsibility for the conditions within your control.

Review workloads, not just coping skills

Stress-management and resilience training can help people develop useful skills for handling pressure. However, individual coping strategies have limits when excessive demands are built into someone's job.

If your team regularly works beyond its contracted hours, investigate why. Look for unrealistic deadlines, vacancies, inefficient systems, unnecessary meetings, conflicting priorities, or work being added faster than it can reasonably be completed.

A workload review can help you decide what needs to continue, what can wait, and what can stop. It can also reveal situations where employees have been carrying an unsustainable workload for so long that it has become accepted as normal.

This is particularly important if you encourage employees to take a mental health day or use personal leave when they're struggling. Time away may provide valuable breathing room, but an employee shouldn't return to the same unmanageable workload plus everything that accumulated while they were away.

Sometimes the most supportive decision you can make is a practical one: extend a deadline, redistribute work, cancel a low-value meeting, recruit additional staff, or acknowledge that a project can't be completed with the resources currently available.

Give people appropriate control over their work

Job control refers to how much influence someone has over aspects of their work, such as how tasks are completed or how their work is organised. Low job control is actually recognised as a psychosocial hazard.

If you manage people, consider where employees genuinely need strict processes and where you've simply inherited them. Some roles will always have limited flexibility because of safety requirements, customer needs, rosters, or other operational realities. Elsewhere, employees may be able to have more input without compromising the work.

You could involve employees when setting realistic deadlines, designing processes, changing responsibilities, or deciding how certain tasks should be completed. Even relatively small changes can reduce the frustration that comes from being held accountable for an outcome while having little influence over how the work gets done.

Listening is particularly important during organisational change. Employees may have practical knowledge about workload, systems, and customer needs that senior leaders don't see from their position.

Train managers to manage work well

Managers are often asked to attend mental health awareness training. Learning how to recognise signs of distress, have sensitive conversations, and direct employees towards professional support can be useful.

Those skills should be accompanied by good management fundamentals.

A manager doesn't need clinical expertise to notice that someone has been working late for weeks. They can ask what's driving the extra hours, help clarify priorities, and raise resource problems with senior leaders. Similarly, they don't need to determine whether workplace conflict has caused a mental health condition before taking inappropriate behaviour seriously.

Useful manager development can cover workload management, psychological safety and mental health first aid, difficult conversations, role clarity, workplace conflict, organisational change, reasonable adjustments, and pathways to professional support such as an EAP.

Managers need support too. If you expect them to protect their team's wellbeing while giving them no influence over staffing, deadlines, or workloads, they'll have limited capacity to address the problems employees bring to them.

Look closely at the culture people experience

You can have excellent wellbeing policies on paper and still have a culture that makes it difficult for employees to use them.

For example, your organisation may encourage healthy boundaries while senior leaders routinely send non-urgent emails late at night. You might promote flexible work, yet employees notice that people who use it are overlooked for opportunities. Managers may encourage open communication, then become defensive when an employee raises a concern.

People learn what a workplace values by watching what happens in practice.

Mental Health Month gives you an opportunity to examine those unwritten expectations. Anonymous surveys, focus groups, one-to-one conversations, and team discussions can all provide useful information, provided employees feel safe enough to answer candidly.

Ask specific questions. Do people feel able to say their workload is too high? Can they disagree respectfully with their manager? Can they take annual leave without monitoring their inbox? Do they know where to go if their manager is the source of the problem?

The answers may tell you more about your workplace culture than participation numbers from a wellbeing event.

Examine the always-on workplace

For many employees, digital communication has blurred the boundary between work and personal time. Emails, messages, and notifications can continue long after the working day has finished.

If that sounds familiar in your organisation, look at the expectations surrounding availability. How often are people contacted outside their normal hours? Are employees expected to monitor messages while they're on leave? Are evening meetings routine rather than exceptional? What behaviour are senior leaders modelling?

Different workplaces need different arrangements, particularly where shift work, global teams, on-call duties, or genuine emergencies are involved. The aim is to make expectations clear.

For example, teams can agree that non-urgent messages outside working hours don't require an immediate response. Leaders who prefer working late can schedule emails to arrive the following morning rather than unintentionally creating pressure for others to respond.

These decisions may seem small, but they're part of the broader work environment your employees experience each day.

Make speaking up safer

Many Mental Health Month campaigns encourage people to talk when they're struggling. If you're asking employees to speak up, you also need to consider what happens when they do.

Imagine someone tells their manager that their workload has become unmanageable. Another employee reports bullying. Someone else requests an adjustment because they're experiencing a mental health condition.

The response to those conversations shapes trust.

Your workplace should have clear pathways for raising concerns, including alternatives when an employee's immediate manager is involved. Employees should understand what happens after a report is made, who will receive the information, and how the organisation will respond.

An EAP can offer confidential counselling and support to an employee affected by workplace conflict or bullying. That's valuable, particularly when someone is distressed. At the same time, the organisation still needs to address the workplace behaviour or risk that led them to seek support.

Look at job design as part of mental health

Some jobs involve unavoidable pressure. Healthcare workers may encounter trauma. Customer-facing staff may deal with aggression. Employees in many industries experience periods of intense demand. But, this doesn’t mean that one cannot ask how these pressures are being managed.

A busy period differs from chronic understaffing. An occasional urgent deadline differs from routinely expecting employees to work unpaid overtime. Difficult interactions may form part of a customer-facing role, while repeated exposure to aggression without adequate safeguards presents another level of risk.

Good work design considers how tasks, responsibilities, resources, systems, and workplace relationships fit together. Safe Work Australia recommends good work design as one way to eliminate or minimise psychosocial risks.

A psychosocial risk assessment can help you distinguish between pressures that are inherent to the work and risks that could be reduced through better staffing, clearer processes, additional support, improved equipment, or changes in how work is organised.

Keep useful wellbeing activities, but know their limits

You don't need to abandon Mental Health Month activities such as wellbeing check-ins, mental health education, team events, EAP promotion, or sessions on stress management.

They can serve useful purposes when they're chosen thoughtfully.

A mental health awareness session can improve understanding. A wellbeing check-in can open a conversation. An EAP can provide confidential professional support. A mental health day may give someone necessary time away from work. A team lunch can strengthen social connection.

The key is recognising what each intervention can and can't do.

If employees repeatedly identify excessive workload as their main concern, another resilience session isn't an adequate organisational response. If bullying is occurring, a mindfulness program won't address the behaviour. If employees don't feel safe challenging their manager, telling them to speak openly won't create psychological safety on its own.

Support the person, but also examine the system around them.

Keep the work going after October

Mental Health Month gives you a useful starting point, but workplace culture develops throughout the year.

Rather than making a long list of commitments, choose a small number of problems your organisation can address properly. You might focus on reducing excessive overtime, improving role clarity, strengthening psychosocial risk management, reviewing workloads, or helping managers respond more effectively when concerns arise.

Give each commitment an owner, a timeframe, and a way to monitor progress. Depending on your workplace, useful information could include overtime, turnover, unscheduled absences, psychosocial hazard reports, staff survey responses, and employee feedback about workload and psychological safety.

Be careful about interpreting individual measures in isolation. Higher EAP use, for example, doesn't necessarily mean employee mental health has deteriorated. Employees may simply be more aware of the service or more comfortable accessing it.

You can learn more by looking at several sources of information and, importantly, continuing to talk with employees.

Then close the loop. Tell people what you heard, what you're changing, what's taking longer, and what can't currently be changed. Employees don't expect every problem to disappear overnight, but they need evidence that raising a concern leads somewhere.

Final thoughts

Morning teas, guest speakers, mental health education, EAP reminders, and wellbeing activities can all have a place during Mental Health Month. They can encourage connection, introduce employees to useful resources, and create opportunities for conversations that might otherwise be difficult to start.

But the strongest workplace mental health strategies also pay attention to what happens on an ordinary Tuesday in March.

Can your employees complete their work within reasonable hours? Do managers respond well when someone says they're struggling? Are people able to take leave and disconnect? Does your organisation act when bullying or harmful behaviour is reported? When workloads become unsustainable, does something actually change?

Those questions may be less visible than a Mental Health Month campaign, but they get closer to the conditions that shape people's working lives.

If you're an employee and work stress is affecting your mental health, you don't have to rely solely on workplace initiatives. Your EAP may offer confidential counselling, and you can also choose to speak with a therapist independently. Therapy can give you space to explore what's happening, understand how work is affecting you, and consider practical ways to protect your wellbeing.

For employers, Mental Health Month can open the conversation, but it’s what you change afterwards that determines how meaningful the conversation can be.