If you are at the beginning stages of creating Mentally Healthy Work, the advice on this page provides ideas on how to start.

When beginning to create Mentally Healthy Work, businesses and organisations can get great insights by involving and listening to workers. Listening to those doing the work is a good step for businesses and organisations to understand their unique workplace context around mentally healthy work.

Worker participation in creating and maintaining Mentally Healthy Work also helps workers feel invested in it too.

Talking to and working with your workers can help check the work design and work environment are enabling Mentally Healthy Work. You can look at and explore relationships and behaviours with your workers so mentally healthy work is demonstrated and sustained. You can find out more on our mentally healthy work page.

When workers have a large amount of freedom to make decisions and low-to-moderate job demands, their mental health is usually good. Conversely a combination of high job demands and low decision-making ability results in high psychological strain and physical illness.

An imbalance, whether perceived or reality, between high efforts and low rewards at work can cause workers to develop stress-related disorders.

Mentally unhealthy work is measurable at a high level by businesses right now by looking at measures such as absenteeism, presenteeism, sickness absence, productivity, intention to resign and employee turnover. While these aren’t the definitive indicators of a problem, when they are high, understanding why from your workers directly can give you an understanding of areas for improvement.