Mental health training for line managers could save companies millions of pounds in lost sick days every year, research suggests. Organisations offering managers mental wellness training experienced better customer service, improved employee retention and recruitment, and reduced long-term sickness absence, according to the study published in the journal Plos One. The findings show mental health training is associated with better business performance and may “hold strategic business value for companies”, the experts said.
Professor Holly Blake, from the School of Health Sciences at the University of Nottingham – who led the study, said: “Mental ill health at work is costly to organisations in terms of sickness absence and lost productivity. “To our knowledge, this is the first study to show that training line managers in mental health is linked to better business outcomes. “This is an important finding that strengthens the business case for why employers should invest in mental health at work.
” Around one in six people in the UK experiences mental health challenges in the workplace, with 12.7% of all sick days attributed to mental ill health. The cost of poor mental health to British employers is around £51 billion a year, recent figures from YouGov and Deloitte show.
For the study, the researchers analysed anonymous survey data from thousands of firms in England collected between 2020 and 2023 by the Warwick Business School’s Enterprise Research Centre. The .
