The Cost of Mental Health Challenges at Work: What Businesses Are Really Paying
Poor mental health rarely arrives at work with an announcement.
More often, it looks like someone struggling to concentrate through a meeting. A manager who knows something is wrong but has no idea how to bring it up. An employee who keeps showing up while running on empty. A high performer who slowly disengages. A team picking up work when someone finally needs to take time away.
By the time poor mental health shows up clearly on an absence report, disability claim or resignation letter, the impact may have been building for months.
And across millions of workplaces, that impact adds up.
The World Health Organization estimates that depression and anxiety alone result in 12 billion lost working days every year, costing the global economy US$1 trillion annually in lost productivity.
That is an enormous number. But for employers, the more useful question is what those costs actually look like inside a business.
The business cost of poor mental health at a glance
Poor mental health can affect productivity, attendance, retention and even the experience organizations deliver to their customers. Here are some of the clearest numbers behind the business impact:
| Business impact | What the research shows |
|---|---|
| Lost productivity | Depression and anxiety result in an estimated 12 billion lost working days every year, costing the global economy US$1 trillion annually in lost productivity. |
| Workplace stress | In 2025, 50% of employees in the United States and Canada reported experiencing significant daily stress, the highest rate of any region measured by Gallup. |
| Scale of the issue | An estimated 15% of working-age adults globally live with a mental health condition, making mental health a workplace issue organizations of every size are likely to encounter. |
What Does Poor Mental Health Cost Businesses?
Some costs are easy to see. An employee takes a week off, and the absence is recorded.
Others are harder to spot. Someone can spend months struggling to focus, second-guessing decisions and using most of their energy just to get through the day, with no obvious line on a spreadsheet capturing what is happening.
That is one reason the business impact of mental health can be underestimated.
Absenteeism is only part of the picture
When mental health affects someone's ability to work, absence can become necessary. And workplaces should make it possible for people to take the time they need.
But absence is only one way mental health challenges affect work.
There is also presenteeism, when someone is technically working but their health is affecting their ability to work at their usual capacity.
They might struggle to concentrate. Tasks can take longer. Decisions feel harder. Communication becomes more difficult. Work gets missed or needs to be picked up by someone else.
None of this means someone has stopped caring about their job. People can spend an enormous amount of effort trying to keep performing while they are struggling, which is why sick days alone rarely tell the whole story.
Poor Mental Health Can Affect Whether People Stay
There is another cost that may not immediately get filed under "mental health": turnover.
Gallup found that employees experiencing burnout are 74% more likely to be looking for another job, showing how quickly a wellbeing issue can become a retention issue.
Replacing someone means recruiting, onboarding and training someone new. It also means losing knowledge, disrupting relationships and asking the rest of the team to carry more while the role is vacant.
But there can be a human cost before the resignation too.
Someone may become quieter. Their performance changes. They stop speaking up or begin taking more time away. A previously engaged employee may start doing only what they need to get through the day.
The question is whether anyone notices those changes and knows what to do next.
Managers Are Often the First People in a Position to Notice
Most managers did not become managers because they were experts in mental health.
Yet they are often the people employees turn to when something is wrong.
That can put managers in a difficult position.
Should I ask what is happening?
What if I say the wrong thing?
Am I supposed to give advice?
What am I allowed to ask?
Without the right skills, a well-meaning manager may avoid the conversation altogether. Or they may jump straight to solutions, say something dismissive without realizing it or try to take on a role they were never meant to play.
Mental health training is not about turning managers into therapists.
It is about giving them the confidence to be managers in everyday moments at work.
That can mean recognizing when something has changed, starting a respectful conversation, listening without trying to diagnose or fix the person, understanding appropriate boundaries and knowing how to connect an employee with the right support.
The World Health Organization specifically recommends mental health training for managers to help them recognize and respond to emotional distress, strengthen skills such as open communication and active listening, and better understand how workplace stressors can affect mental health. WHO also recommends mental health literacy and awareness training for employees to increase knowledge and help reduce stigma.
Does Workplace Mental Health Training Make a Difference?
There is growing evidence that it can.
A peer reviewed study examined data from 7,139 organizations across several years and looked at whether organizations providing mental health training to line managers reported different business outcomes from those that did not.
Organizations offering manager mental health training were more likely to report improvements in employee recruitment, retention, customer service and business performance. The research also found an association between manager training and lower levels of long term sickness absence related to mental ill health.
The research does not suggest that a single training session will produce those outcomes. It does, however, reinforce the business case for helping managers recognize and respond to mental health concerns at work.
Mental Health Awareness Matters Beyond Managers
Managers have a particular responsibility, but mental health at work is not only a manager issue.
Employees also shape what happens when someone is struggling, from whether people feel comfortable speaking up to how coworkers respond when they do.
Mental health awareness training can help create a shared understanding across a team. It should go beyond definitions of anxiety, depression or burnout and focus on what people may actually encounter at work: how mental health can show up differently, how stigma can affect whether someone asks for help, what supportive language sounds like and where professional or organizational support fits in.
The real test is whether people can use what they learned when a difficult conversation happens. Because eventually, one will.
Mental Health Training Is One Part of the Picture
This part matters. You cannot train your way out of chronic understaffing. Mental health training is most useful when it sits alongside workplace practices that support people day to day. If workloads are consistently unreasonable or harmful management behaviours go unaddressed, teaching employees how to manage stress only goes so far.
The CDC's current workplace mental health guidance says changing workplace policies and practices is the strongest way to address worker mental health and burnout. Managers can then play an important role in reducing and preventing job related stress within that broader approach.
WHO makes a similar distinction. Its recommendations include organizational changes that address workplace risks alongside manager training, employee awareness, individual supports and accommodations.
A stronger mental health strategy looks at both sides: the conditions people are working in and how prepared they are to recognize and respond when someone is struggling.
When Does Custom Mental Health Training Make Sense?
Mental health does not show up the same way in every workplace.
A manager leading a remote professional services team can face very different situations from a supervisor leading frontline employees. Healthcare workers may experience trauma and emotional exhaustion that looks very different from stress in a corporate office. A workplace experiencing a significant organizational change may need something different again.
That is where generic advice can start to fall short. Custom mental health training can reflect the situations people are dealing with.
That could mean building scenarios around conversations managers regularly encounter. It could mean incorporating an organization's policies, benefits or employee resources so people know exactly where to turn. It could mean focusing more deeply on burnout, psychological safety, trauma, difficult conversations or supporting employees through change.
The goal is not to make training more complicated. It is to make it easier for people to recognize themselves and their workplace in what they are learning, so they know what to do when the situation is no longer hypothetical.
What can mental health awareness training change?
In a recent Mental Health Awareness session with one organization, we asked the team to share their biggest takeaways from the training.
Some talked about realizing just how many people are affected by mental health challenges. Others spoke about making more space for mental health on their teams, being more supportive of colleagues and finding better ways to manage stress at work.
After the session, 85% of respondents said the content was relevant to them, and 85% said they wanted access to more training.
Those responses point to something that can be difficult to capture in a traditional business metric: awareness changes what people notice. It can help employees recognize when someone may be struggling, think differently about their own mental health and feel better equipped to contribute to a more supportive workplace.
What should organizations do to support mental health at work?
There is no single program that creates a mentally healthy workplace. A stronger approach starts by looking at what is actually happening inside the organization.
Review patterns in absenteeism, disability leave and turnover. Ask managers which conversations around mental health they feel least prepared to handle. Check whether employees know what support is available and how to access it.
Then look at where the gaps are.
For some organizations, that may mean stronger manager training. For others, the bigger issue may be workplace pressures, hard-to-find resources or a lack of shared understanding around mental health.
Training can be part of the answer. It works best when it responds to a real need, rather than being treated as the need itself.
The Cost of Doing Nothing Rarely Stays Invisible Forever
There will always be employees experiencing mental health challenges. That is part of having human beings at work.
What organizations can influence is what happens next: whether people feel able to speak up, whether managers know how to respond, and whether support is available before someone reaches a breaking point.
Those moments may never show up neatly on a balance sheet. But over time, they affect how people work, whether they stay and how supported they feel when things get difficult.
Mental health training will not solve every factor affecting employee wellbeing. It can, however, help people feel more prepared for the conversations and situations they are likely to encounter at work.
