ReWAGE’s most recent policy brief argues that there is an urgent need to reduce rising levels of mental ill-health in the workplace and to help organisations retain and integrate employees with mental conditions.

Mental ill-health has severe personal and economic effects. For employers, it is a major source of sickness absence, resulting in 17.9 million working days lost in 2019/20.

The Covid pandemic has shone a spotlight on mental ill-health in the workplace with increased pressures from long covid, personal financial difficulty and new patterns of remote working all playing a part. Physical injuries at work have reduced substantially in recent decades but there has been a notable rise in work-related mental ill-health - with a sharp increase between 2018/19 and 2019/20.

While there is scope for employers to make adjustments to work conditions, there has been little sustained improvement over the last two decades to address the known work-related risk factors that contribute to mental ill-health, indicating that there is need for a change in policy.

ReWAGE’s policy brief, Recovering better - improving mental health in the workplace, recommends that the government considers requiring employers to report on work-related risk factors for mental health in their annual company reports. These figures should include evidence from employees and be presented overall, by major occupational groups and by gender.

It also recommends that the reporting should be mandatory for public sector organisations and for private companies with 250 employers or more. This should be extended progressively to all private companies with 50+ employees.

Professor Chris Warhurst, co-chair of ReWAGE, explains:

“The approach of current policy needs to be rethought. Effective policy requires improved consultation with workers as a lever for creating healthier work conditions. There is also a need to reform company reporting to provide greater transparency about the quality of work conditions.

“The introduction of new monitoring and reporting requirements would promote the importance of worker mental health within organisations and help to highlight the key factors that might be a danger to it. It also would provide a stronger sense of worker involvement in the search for practical improvements in the work process and contribute to higher organisational productivity.”

 What are the most important work-related risks to mental health?

· Workload - there is consistent evidence that work intensity has been rising over recent decades in the UK and that work demands are greater when workers lack control over the way their work is carried out.

· Poor quality line management – lack of managerial support is the second most frequently cited source of work-related stress by those affected.

· Job insecurity - consistent evidence shows that this is a major risk to mental health – both the fear of losing employment and the fear of deterioration in job quality.

· Financial insecurity – this is also a significant source of psychological distress. People with low incomes suffer from greater anxiety and depression than those with higher incomes. lockdown measures.

What helps to prevent mental ill-health at work?

Worker participation - both control over decisions about their immediate work task and the influence that workers have on wider organisational decisions that affect their work can reduce work-related mental ill-health. Over last 25 years the discretion that workers have over how they do their tasks has declined, while organisational voice has remained at a low level available to only 30% of the workforce.

Skills and training – the ability to update and upgrade skills is an important source of protection against the risks of job insecurity. More highly skilled workers are less likely to lose their jobs and find it easier to get another job if they are made redundant. However, those most at risk – the low skilled – are the least likely to be given opportunities for training, and the Covid crisis has only accentuated this.

Improving line management - the quality of supervision is one of the main factors that affects workers’ sense of organisational justice and is related strongly to mental health. Despite the importance of line managers being able to detect and support those with mental health problems, only 51% of organisations train managers in this skill.