Stop reacting to mental health absence. Start preventing it.

Mental Health Absence is Rising

Mental health-related absence has reached record levels. According to the CIPD’s 2025 Health and Wellbeing at Work report, mental ill health is the leading cause of long-term absence and the second most common cause of short-term absence.

At the same time, the recent Keep Britain Working review highlighted that, in the UK, mental health absence is now a significant driver of economic inactivity, with many people struggling to return to sustainable work after extended periods off sick.

For HR professionals and business leaders, the frustration is acute. You’re investing in wellbeing programmes, tracking absence data, and reporting to boards on the scale of the challenge. Yet despite this effort, the numbers persist.

Addressing the challenge requires a different approach. And it starts with data.

The Three Limitations of Absence Data

Most HR teams track comprehensive absence metrics: lost working days, sustainable return rates, team-level absence patterns, costs. Some have sophisticated dashboards showing hotspots by function or department.

This data is useful for reporting and identifying problem areas. But it has three fundamental limitations.

1. You don’t know what’s causing it.

The sick note says “stress” or “anxiety.” But what caused the stress? Is it workload? A difficult manager relationship? Team dynamics? Personal challenges? All of these create “stress,” yet each requires completely different interventions.

2. You don’t know the full scale.

Mental health stigma remains. This means people report physical symptoms — back pain, migraines, fatigue — rather than mental health challenges. Your mental health absence data shows you who feels safe enough to name it. It’s likely an undercount.

3. You don’t know who’s at risk.

Absence data tells you who has already taken time off. It doesn’t tell you who’s struggling now, and who risks absence in the coming weeks or months.

Fundamentally, absence data only reports outcomes, not causes. By the time the pattern is clear enough to act on, it is too late – people are already absent.

What You Need to Measure Instead

To get ahead of mental health absence, you need to understand two things: the resilience of your workforce and the pressure in your organisation. These operate at different levels and require different measurement approaches — but together they give you the complete picture.

1. Workforce resilience

A team is hitting its targets, but several individuals are running on empty. Energy is low; relationships are tense; there is more pushback.

Resilience is the capacity your people have to absorb pressure and sustain performance – not just today, but over time. It operates across three dimensions: psychological (the capacity to think clearly, confidently and flexibly under pressure), social (how well connected and supported they are), and physical (the capacity to renew energy sustainably to meet demands). When all three are well-developed, people can manage pressure without it tipping into absence or burnout.

Measuring workforce resilience identifies who has strong foundations across these dimensions and who is showing early signs of depletion – months before someone reaches crisis point. That creates the opportunity for targeted, early support rather than reactive damage limitation.

2. Organisational pressure

Alongside individual resilience, it’s equally important to understand the conditions people are working in. Organisational pressure refers to the psychosocial risks embedded in how work is structured, managed, and experienced. These create strain across your workforce and, left unaddressed, will erode performance and drive absence regardless of how resilient your people are.

The HSE Management Standards identify six key psychosocial risk factors – and they are increasingly recognised by regulators, insurers, and occupational health practitioners as a critical area of workforce risk that most organisations are not yet systematically measuring:

i. Demands:
Is workload manageable and evenly distributed, or are some teams chronically overloaded?

ii. Control:
Do people have autonomy over how their work gets done, or is there micromanagement?

iii. Support
Is there adequate support from managers and colleagues, or do people struggle alone?

iv. Relationships
Are team dynamics healthy, or is there conflict and exclusion?

v. Role
Does everyone have clear responsibilities, or is there ambiguity and confusion?

vi. Change
Is change managed well, or are people constantly destabilised?

When you measure these factors systematically, patterns emerge quickly. You see where risk is concentrated across your organisation and which specific pressures are driving it – giving you the evidence base to act before absence follows.

From Reaction to Prevention

Most organisations are measuring absence outcomes, not causes. Assessing workforce resilience and organisational pressure changes that — giving you early visibility of where risk is building, before it becomes absence.

That’s the difference between managing mental health absence and preventing it.

If you’d like to understand what’s going on for your workforce, we’re here to help. Get in touch to find out more about our Workforce Resilience & Risk Assessment.

Author Bio: Sandra Ordel is a Senior Business Psychologist at The Wellbeing Project, specialising in workforce resilience and neuropsychology. She works with organisations worldwide to measure and strengthen resilience, helping leaders build high-performing teams and cultures of healthy performance.