Uncategorized

What is the greatest lever for productivity in your organisation? Tech adoption? Innovation? Performance & talent management? Training? Automation?

A comparison of productivity drivers across UK organisations indicates that the highest average returns for each £1 of investment lie in managing mental health risk, and direct mental health investment (employee assistance and workplace mental wellbeing programmes). Based on this analysis investing in workplace mental health and wellbeing is likely to bring about the greatest gains as a business productivity accelerator.Which leads us to ask, are leadership development initiatives preparing leaders for this challenge? Given 70% of leadership programme directors say they only measure reaction or knowledge, rather than lasting behavior change or outcomes (MIT) and for those who do measure impact, only 15% of organisations  report achieving measurable business impact (LEadX Benchmark Report, 2024) we think it is unlikely.

However, organisations are leaving these gains on the table; mental health direct investment accounts for only 1.2% of spend across all main levers of productivity. Most notably, psychosocial risk management, with the highest reported return of between £6 and £9 for every £1 invested, sits at the lowest proportion (just 0.22%) of business productivity investment.

---

Table 1: Productivity Drivers and Estimated, Annual UK Investment*

Productivity Driver	Estimated Annual Spend UK	Estimated ROI per £1 Invested	Estimated Annual Return(£Bn)
Human Capital (Training, skills development, leadership, DEI)	£40–45 billion (19.5%)	£3–£4 (≈300–400%)	£120–180bn
Technology & Data (IT infrastructure, digital tools, automation, analytics)	£105–115 billion (50%)	£2–£5	£210–575bn
Innovation & Improvement (R&D, operational consulting, process redesign, agile/lean transformation)	£50–60 billion (25%)	£5–£10	£250–600bn
Workplace Systems & Culture (Organisation design, values, behaviour change, inclusive culture)	£3–5 billion (1.8%)	£2–£4 (cultural/ engagement ROI)	£6–20bn
Mental Health (Direct Investment – EAPs, mental health benefits, wellbeing programmes, apps)	£3–6 billion (2%)	≈ £4.70 (470%)	£14–28bn
External & Societal Engagement (CSR, ESG, community engagement, policy advocacy)	£2–3 billion (1.14%)	£1–2 (brand and CSR value)	£2–6bn
Psychosocial Risk Management (Formal risk assessments, prevention systems, job and organisational design for wellbeing, Health Promotion)	< £1 billion (0.22%)	£6–£9 (emerging HSE/EU- OSHA data)	£6–9bn

Why this investment gap?

There is a persistent view that the wellbeing gap is caused by the hidden nature of the mental health crisis – employees suffering individual challenges in silence. The conclusion being that we simply need better apps and individual support for workers to take better care of their own mental health and therefore be fit and ready to work.

It may be true that many employees still fear the stigma of mental health and what that might mean for their career prospects, or that they lack the safety to raise mental health concerns in the workplace. However, we don’t need employees to advocate for themselves – the statistics are well known and far from hidden:

• Stress, depression, or anxiety accounts for 49% of all work-related ill health and 54% of all working days lost due to illness, according to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE, 2023).
• The cost to the UK economy is estimated at £56 billion per year, with £18 billion of that shouldered by employers in terms of reduced productivity, staff turnover, and absenteeism (Deloitte, 2022).

Read any organisational mental health blog, article, book, and you will find these statistics (to the point of cliché). Against a backdrop of societal mental health crisis (MHA findings that at least 1:4 adults will suffer mental health challenges over the course of a lifetime) –
the mental health crisis facing British business is not an unknown.
This is a challenge we cannot ignore.

Why then are organisations failing to tackle this critical issue?

We think this boils down to one core issue –mental wellbeing is being treated as an individual challenge to manage, not a systemic opportunity to maximise.

Through our work at the intersection of performance and mental wellbeing, we have observed a critical misconception across many organisations and the way that leaders and individuals talk about mental health – mental health is still perceived to be an individual challenge, a resilience gap, or worse, a personal failing; the causes and effects a private problem, to be dealt with by the individual.

Often, the employer stands benevolently in the background, waiting to provide a helpline, time off, or temporarily to reduce pressure on the individual so that they can seek their own recovery.

However, across diverse organisations in healthcare, policing, professional services, the voluntary sector, construction, and tech, we have found that the mental health challenge facing the UK workforce is systemic; it is a product of systems, processes, ways of working, goals, strategies, reward structures, and the psychosocial context that people work in.

Furthermore, the research is clear on the causes of poor occupational mental health; meaningless work, tech overload, bureaucratic overheads, reduced autonomy, precarious employment, lack of clarity, unachievable or competing targets, and cost of living pressures amount toa systemic, not an individual mental health crisis all of which are within the influence of the organisations we work for.

Short courses of CBT, lunchtime wellness programmes, or notice-board encouragement to look after wellbeing will never be effective if we arepatching people up, simply to send them back into the same exposure, demands, and stressors which contributed to their mental health challenge in the first place.

Even the most capable, motivated individuals will struggle if the environment they work in is fundamentally unsupportive or psychologically unsafe.

In short, organisations are not yet stepping up to play their role in tackling the mental health crisis, and their performance is suffering as a result. We have a UK workforce that is burnt out, sick, and unable to give of its best in creativity, innovation, performance, or collaboration; the powerful human drivers of productivity. That’s because the way in which we build our organisations is causing stress, burnout, isolation, and overwhelm.

Our conclusion? Work is often doing people harm, but it doesn’t have to.

By directly investing in workplace mental health, and managing systemic psychosocial risks, we can unlock productivity gains that can transform the performance of the organisation. Read on to find out how.

Given only 31% of HR leaders believe their current organisational culture effectively drives performance (Gartner, 2022), it’s unsurprising we have been working with many clients on evolving their cultures recently. One thing that has been consistent across these clients is that, over recent years, the approach to culture has become overly complicated. So much so it’s hindered progress.

If we think of culture as a conduit for connecting employees to each other, to the organisation and fundamentally to a sense of belonging what becomes important is fostering an environment in which people feel secure and included and where stress is minimised, allowing energy to be channelled into individual and collective performance. With this in mind, early conversations with clients have quickly shifted to a discussion about why it is time to move away from the mindset of wanting to drive a complete culture transformation and instead tackle culture in a psychologically deeper – yet much, much simpler – way.

Culture change shouldn’t be the priority, cultivating it to tap into the core psychology that inspires performance and promotes good mental health should be.

When you take a closer look at ‘high performing’ companies who create business results whilst protecting or improving their employees’ mental wellbeing, it’s not the ‘archetype’ of their culture that correlates between them. It matters less what the exact nature of the culture is (well, as long as is it not toxic), but the fact that the culture it is very strongly felt by everyone in the organisation and most critically that it produces 5 conditions that facilitate high performance:

• Psychological safety & trust: an environment in which people feel they are empowered to experiment, speak out and fail fast; there is safety net to bounce on when things wrong and no blame is laid
• Psychological empowerment: an environment in which people are given the freedom to act within clearly defined boundaries, are able to use their initiative and proactive accountability is celebrated
• Meaning & purpose: an environment that helps people connect their work, and their daily tasks, to a bigger purpose that aligns with their personal values
• Belonging: an environment that promotes deep, purposeful relationships and fosters open and challenging dialogue
• A growth mindset: an environment that creates always-on learning, pushes people to strive towards goals outside of their comfort zone and promotes professional curiosity

Many different “types” of cultures can create these conditions in many ways. These 5 conditions are a powerful force as they tap into intrinsic human motivations. We all are motivated, to a greater or lesser extent, by several core psychological needs:

• Agency – to feel that we are able to impact what is happening
• Contribution – to feel as though we are offering up something that is meaningful and worthwhile
• Altruism –to feel as though we are having an impact on the lives of those around us
• Significance –to feel as though we matter
• Progression – to feel as though we are growing and evolving as individuals, and as a collective

It’s no wonder that all types of talent flourishes in cultures that create these conditions.

Culture evolves through emotional and behavioural contagion, not change programmes.

Culture is emergent and evolving – it lives and breathes in the way humans do. It is always changing. To be able to leverage a culture that creates the conditions above it is important to understand what really shapes it. Culture is built from the things everyone in the organisation says and does, which are themselves driven by beliefs, emotions and thoughts. Some of these are going to be linked to our core values or influenced by our personality, so somewhat stable over time, but a huge amount of what we think, feel and believe fluctuates based upon the events and experiences we encounter.

Leadership, yes, has an important role to play but it is not the only thing that does. Too often organisations believe that if they get senior leaders role modeling the right behaviors then the culture will evolve, and the right type of environment will emerge. A systemic approach to shaping the conditions can go much further, faster than just focusing on leadership role modelling alone.

The social fabric of the organisation, shaped by the day-to-day interactions between peers, colleagues, teams, is one of the largest impacts on thoughts, feelings, beliefs and attitudes. Research from Deloitte (2023) shows that 82% of employees believe peers—not leadership—have the greatest influence on workplace culture. Any investment in culture should include an appreciation of everyone’s role in shaping the experiences of others and in taking personal accountability for the culture. Systems and processes directly influence everyday experiences at work, influencing how people think and feel and signpost what matters to the organisation. Research from Gallup (2023) shows that only 20% of employees strongly agree that their organisation’s systems and processes support a healthy work culture. Yet, very few organisations are willing to consider a systemic review of these in a culture change programme, missing a huge opportunity to create wide reaching changes in everyday behaviours and mindsets.

Creating these conditions through your culture is easier than you think

If organisations really want to leverage their culture to drive performance and mental wellbeing, first they should stop trying to change their culture from one discrete construct to another. Instead, they should focus on understanding how strong their culture is and what facilitates and prohibits the 5 conditions needed for success. They can then target their focus on overcoming any barriers to these conditions and crucially, growing and evolving what is already strong in their culture.

A great place to start is with these questions:

1. Where are we today –what factors most greatly shape our culture and how strong is it?
2. What do our people really think, feel and believe and how does this enable and block the 5 conditions for high performance and wellbeing?
3. What is the highest yield condition(s) to focus on?
4. What is most greatly affecting this condition? E.g. consider behavioural norms, organisation narratives, leadership role modelling, systems and processes.

Usually, organisations have the data and insight to answer these questions, it’s just a case of pulling it together and looking at it through the lens of the 5 cultural conditions. This means they can quickly move to taking action. Small changes in the system that create a very different felt experience day to day. Greatest impact comes from involving everyone in a bottom-up, middle-in, top-supported approach. Recognising that change is iterative and will take time but remembering to celebrate, and share, progress along the way.

Just 25% of HR professionals rate their leadership development as effective (Brandon Hall Group, 2022).
 
The reason for this is that leadership has fundamentally changed. Leaders today must be adept at putting people, purpose and the planet at the core of what they do, whilst helping their teams deal with ongoing ambiguity and change. Expectations of new demographics in the workforce, a mental health crisis, sociopolitical and economic challenges, tech transformation, changing regulation and conscious stakeholders means leaders need to be able to enable purposeful performance from diverse people, in a context that feels like it never stops changing. And crucially, with 1 in 2 employees saying their job negatively impacts their mental health with poor leadership identified as a top factor (Mind Share Partners, 2023) they need to be able to deliver this performance without eroding their teams’ mental wellbeing. Leaders need to create environments where others feel psychologically safe and included, comfortable with uncertainty and where everyone is equipped to push boundaries and be innovative in how they work. They need to understand how to lead a system that supports high performance and optimum mental wellbeing simultaneously.

Which leads us to ask, are leadership development initiatives preparing leaders for this challenge? Given 70% of leadership programme directors say they only measure reaction or knowledge, rather than lasting behavior change or outcomes (MIT) and for those who do measure impact, only 15% of organisations  report achieving measurable business impact (LEadX Benchmark Report, 2024) we think it is unlikely.

---

How can leadership development improve?

This challenge requires development offers to shift focus from assuming a change in leadership behaviour in isolation will create the intended outcomes, and instead to think about a leader’s impact on the system. Development interventions would benefit from a deeper understanding of the leaders’ context, the systemic influences that are most strong and how leaders’ roles and behaviours influence how the system operates. Development should have greater focus on the inner development (the mindset and psychological development required for behaviour change is often underestimated) and the outer impact (business outcomes and societal impact are often assumed or totally overlooked) as well as developing the behaviours and skills leaders need to be a catalyst for positive change, tangibly.

At honne, we tackle this by concentrating on fostering change across 3 levels of the leader’s ecosystem: the personal, the social, and the systemic. We structure around these levels – ‘leading for me, we & world’.

• Leading for me builds the psychological skills individuals need
• Leading for we develops the capabilities they need to lead their teams and collaborate 
with the people that they work
• Leading for the world, is about understanding the wider system and seeing the part 
that their work plays in it

---

Leading for the world: a clearer outcomes focus

Without context, development is theoretical, lacks relevance and engagement. That’s why we always start by thinking about the ‘why?’:

What is happening, why is it happening, what is changing, what will be the outcomes of that change, and what does that mean for my leadership?

We help leaders link the unique context faced by the organisations with their own and the lives of their teams to create a living, breathing purpose that guides and shapes their decisions and actions.

---

Leading we: create the conditions for performance and wellbeing

Our research and experience show that the leaders who are effective in creating results whilst prioritising the wellbeing of their teams and stakeholders are the leaders who create the right conditions for everyone to thrive. We help leaders understand the small everyday acts and use high practical techniques to build an environment that helps everyone feel purposeful in what they do, that is psychological safe, fosters a sense of belonging, truly empowers and unlocks growth (see more on the 5 conditions here).

---

Leading Me: psychologically fit leadership

There is no point in changing the system, or encouraging behaviour change, if we don’t also concentrate on the inner world of the leader. Our experience and insight as psychologists enable us to work with the ‘inner blocks’ that hold leaders back, at the same time as developing the psychological skills they need as leaders to be effective in their roles:

• Thinking – developing the systemic thinking skills they need to be able to ‘see the 
whole’ and to work with all the critical dimensions at work in the context
• Feeling – developing the inner resources leaders need to look after their own 
wellbeing, whilst also being able to be empathetic, compassionate and adaptive 
toward others
• Being – developing their ‘self-concept’ as a leader. A rapidly changing context asks 
something different of leaders, and we help leaders see themselves and their potential 
differently, raising their aspiration, unlocking new ways of being.

At honne, we approach the development of leadership for me, we and the world by focusing on the leaders’ whole context, including what’s happening in the market, their team and the invisible, yet palpable cultural dimensions of the organisation. We build bespoke interventions that enable a shift in perspectives such as expert led content that really challenges how we see things, change the conversation through new dialogues, group connection, diverse opinions and co-learning and enable practical, early actions surfaced through coaching that starts the wave of change.

---

Where to start?

If you are reviewing your leadership development offer, we encourage you to start with 3 questions:

• What is the impact we want to have in our unique context and what is our theory of 
change about the shift needed from leadership to create these outcomes?
• What are the key enablers and blockers of the 5 conditions for performance and 
mental wellbeing in our organisation, and to how can we enable leaders to create the 
systemic change required to enhance the conditions?
• What shift in thinking, feeling and being does the context demand from our leaders 
and how can we support the inner development needed for this?

In lifting the lid through research and conversations, we find that many leaders lack the confidence to focus on mental health and wellbeing in the workplace because they are concerned about reputational risk or uncovering issues at an organisational or individual level that they don’t know how to fix. Many leaders are facing burnout themselves and feeling like they will take on a role as therapist, or shoulder the systemic burden of mental health often feels too much (and rightly so!).

The good news is that there is lots of powerful research into workplace mental health and wellbeing that provides clear and simple levers organisations can use to transform the workplace into a healthy, sustainable and productive environment where people can thrive and give of their best..

1. Building Confidence and the Business Case

Before we take the steps to create change, we have to establish the commitment to tackle mental health systemically. Organisations must treat mental health safety as seriously as physical safety.

We would not let a construction worker operate at height without a harness, so why let them work under constant emotional strain without support or a social safety net to fall back on?

Start by gaining commitment, and budget, from senior leadership by helping them to see the productivity benefits that can be realised by investing in a systemic approach to mental wellbeing. Start by securing the budget for Step 2 below, whilst providing a roadmap for the future steps and benefits downstream.

---

2. Risk Assessment and Hope

From moral injury and professional purpose in healthcare, to being caught in the trap of ‘doing more with less’ whilst striving to create a safer society in policing, to quarter-by-quarter stretch targets and value creation in business, each sector and organisation has specific wellbeing risk factors, as well as key drivers that can help to accelerate mental wellbeing.

To identify the strengths, risks, and opportunities in your organisation:

• Start with a mental health risk assessment. Understand, and build a shared language of 
the specific stressors, structural issues, and cultural dynamics that contribute to harm, 
or promote wellbeing, within the specific teams and contexts your people work in
• The HSE’s Management Standards provide a useful framework, focusing on demands, 
control, support, relationships, role clarity, and change. But many organisations stop at 
basic compliance and miss out on the real benefits of investing in mental wellbeing
• Go further by understand how your systems, leadership, culture, and ways of working 
impact real people. Don’t just look at pain points, study the teams where people are 
thriving in your organisation

Uncovering these factors can lead to the keys to unlock productivity gains within your unique context, unlocking your talent as a true competitive differentiator. Reporting and sharing these results transparently also acts as a relief to your workforce, who feel heard about the challenges they face, and more confident and hopeful about the path to improvement.

---

3. Job Design and Work Systems

Reassess how jobs are structured:

• Are workloads realistic?
• Are goals clear and achievable?
• Do people have both accountability (often) and autonomy (rarely)?
• Are expectations manageable?
• Do common ways of working lead to overwhelm or powerful collaboration?

Intentionally design work systems that enable human performance, rather than extract it.

---

4. Leadership that Acts Systemically

Move away from performance management that targets individuals in isolation. Instead, focus on building environments where people can thrive together:

• Prioritise the psychosocial conditions and lead to thriving, prosperous teams
• Encourage learning, feedback, and collaboration
• Acknowledge that systems—not individuals—are the root of many performance issues 
and empower leaders and teams to change them

Systemic leadership sees wellbeing not as a benefit, but as a requirement for sustainable results.

---

5. Comprehensive Support Services

If you’re serious about mental health, invest in Employee Assistance Programmes that go beyond a helpline, app, or web portal:

• Provide access to high quality therapy
• Include financial, legal, family, and caregiving advice
• Offer proactive outreach, not just crisis response

Ensure people know how to use these services. Uptake is often low because services are poorly communicated or stigmatised (or have a reputation for not being very good).

6. Build Conditions for Thriving

Mental health is more than the absence of illness. People thrive when they experience:

• Trust and a safety net to fall back on when things go wrong
• Autonomy and a sense of control
• Belonging and inclusive relationships
• Purpose and connection to meaningful work
• Growth and opportunities to develop

These are the same conditions that drive performance. Investing in them is not a trade-off—it’s a multiplier.

Business as a Force for Mental Health in Society

Finally, it is time to reframe the role that organisations and institutions have to play beyond the workplace. Your business does not exist in a vacuum. It operates in a national context in which mental healthcare is at breaking point; where we can no longer rely on the NHS to pick up the slack in mental health and wellbeing, nor individuals or their families to shoulder the responsibility or financial costs caused by poor work.

You can:

• Advocate for mental health parity in government-backed research, policy and funding 
to help build a healthy workforce from apprenticeship to retirement
• Support local initiatives that reduce social isolation or poverty in the communities 
within which your business is based to build your employee value proposition, and the 
wellbeing of the community from which your workforce if drawn
• Build ethical supply chains that reduce exploitation and promote good work, 
increasing productivity and retention
• Design inclusive products and services that support wellbeing and deliberately 
contribute to a healthy society with a workforce fit for the demands of changing 
economic and global dynamics

This is not about benevolance. It’s about vision. A society that protects mental health is one where talent flourishes, trust grows, and business thrives.