The true test of an organisation is not how inclusive it purports to be, or how well it supports people once they are signed off sick. It’s how they create a workplace that people don’t need to recover from.
The latest Keep Britain Working review rightly highlights the importance of helping people stay healthy and in work. Too often, however, that conversation focuses on intervention after problems have escalated. I can see why – every year, around 300,000 people with a health condition leave work, and the longer someone is absent, the less likely they are to return. But by the time someone reaches that point, so many opportunities to prevent harm have already been missed.
If we are serious about supporting people to stay in work, we need to shift the conversation and answer the question:
Are we creating workplaces that people need to take sick leave to recover from?
If the answer might be yes, inclusion isn’t where it needs to be.
This isn’t just a policy discussion, or a space for targets on retention, participation and productivity. At its heart, this is about people:
- It’s about whether someone feels safe enough to ask for support.
- Whether managers have the confidence to have an early conversation.
- Whether reasonable adjustments are put in place before someone reaches breaking point.
- Whether an employee feels able to be honest about their health without fear of judgement or career consequences.
These everyday experiences determine whether people thrive at work or gradually become overwhelmed by it.
As someone who identifies as disabled, I have left workplaces not because I lacked the skills, commitment or desire to do my job, but because the support I needed wasn’t available, arrived too late, or felt too difficult to ask for. I’ve also felt the impact of staying in environments that weren’t designed to support people like me.
That’s why I care so deeply about workplace inclusion, and why I founded The Mental Health Community, because I have experienced first-hand what happens when support comes too late and I wanted to help create the kind of workplace culture that I spent years searching for.
Inclusion calls for us to look further upstream and ask what we could have done differently to prevent people getting to this point.
Organisations need to stop thinking about inclusion purely as a response to problems and start seeing it as a form of prevention. Most people don’t wake up one morning and decide to leave work due to ill-health, the signs are there much earlier:
- A conversation that never happens.
- Support that arrives too late.
- An adjustment that is requested only after months of struggle and the start of a performance management process.
- An employee who worries about how they will be perceived if they speak up.
These challenges build gradually until someone reduces their hours, takes extended sickness absence or leaves altogether. By then, the focus shifts to retention and return-to-work support, which is too little, too late.
Psychological safety is the foundation
Psychological safety isn’t just a wellbeing buzzword, it is the foundation of inclusion.
It’s what enables someone to feel safe enough to disclose a health condition, request an adjustment, raise a concern or ask for support before difficulties escalate. Without it, even the best workplace support remains inaccessible.
Independent research shows that organisations with stronger psychological safety benefit from reduced sickness absence, lower presenteeism and improved staff retention. We’ve seen this come to life with the organisations who have completed our Community Headspace programme: they’ve seen the proportion of people who feel safe and confident being open about their mental health at work increase from 49% to 94% and the proportion who feel safe asking for support increase from 60% to 88%.
We also found that as a result of their work on the programme:
- 81% reported improvements in the quality of mental health conversations.
- 67% gained more tools to help create safe and supportive workplace cultures.
- 67% felt more confident supporting colleagues experiencing mental health challenges.
What are sometimes dismissed as “soft” outcomes are actually the conditions that enable people to stay in work and thrive, reducing the likelihood that people reach crisis point.
What good looks like
Organisations don’t need to wait for a new strategy or piece of legislation. Meaningful change can be achieved by getting the fundamentals right and viewing mental health inclusion as an essential part of good people management, not a specialist initiative.
At The Mental Health Community we’ve seen how relatively simple changes can significantly improve people’s experiences at work:
- Expanding pastoral support through regular one-to-ones, reflective conversations and peer supervision.
- Training managers to have confident, compassionate conversations about mental health.
- Reviewing policies to ensure they are genuinely inclusive in practice, not just on paper.
- Creating opportunities for earlier conversations about barriers, adjustments and support needs through tools such as work-with-me passports and supportive induction processes.
None of these actions are revolutionary, they work because they address one of the biggest barriers to inclusion: waiting too long before support is offered.
For me, this conversation has never been about getting more people into work at any cost. It’s about creating workplaces where people with disabilities, long-term health conditions or mental ill-health can stay, contribute and succeed without sacrificing their wellbeing.
That is the workplace I spent years looking for and the one we, at The Mental Health Community are trying to help build. Because the most inclusive workplace isn’t the one that helps people recover from work.