The mental health benefits people use: Rethinking support for today's workforce

UK employers face rising mental health-related absence, yet available support is underused due to low awareness and poor integration. Treating wellbeing as a core business priority can improve performance, reduce absence, and retain talent.

Across the UK, employees are facing acute mental health challenges, many without the support they need. Ensuring our employees can contribute their fullest isn't just a pastoral duty- it is a commercial necessity.

When organisations fail to get this right; culture erodes, productivity plummets, and talent leaves.

The scale of the crisis

The quiet crisis of sickness absence and economic inactivity in the UK has reached a 15-year high. To understand the scale of what employers face, the government's Keep Britain Working report and recent industry data highlight a stark reality:

Metric	The cost of sickness
Significant absence driver	Nearly 9% of total sickness absence is attributed to mental health conditions
Long-term absence	Mental ill-health accounts for 41% of all long-term work absences
Average cost	£120 per day in lost profit per absent worker
Replacement costs	Over £11,000 to replace a single employee lost to ill-health

Many employers hope public health wait times will ease, but the NHS elective care waiting list remains at a staggering 7.22 million cases. Providing private healthcare pathways isn't a luxury anymore- it’s a vital mechanism to get people treated and back to health quickly.

The EAP friction: A structural failure

As an employer, it’s easy to check a box, point to an employee assistance programme (EAP), and consider the problem solved. But when was the last time any of us actually used our EAP?

While these programs are available to roughly 55% of the British workforce, research shows that average annual EAP utilisation sits stubbornly at roughly 3.34%.

When mental health is a primary absence challenge for employers, a glaring friction emerges. The problem is massive; use of first line support is minuscule.

This disconnect happens because:

Fragmented support: Services operate in silos, forcing struggling employees to navigate complex bureaucracy.
Lack of integration: Wellbeing schemes are rarely embedded into everyday line management or absence processes.
Awareness gaps: Only about 27% of employees are actively aware their company even offers an EAP.

Moving beyond the quick fixes

To build a resilient workforce, employers must pivot toward a holistic framework:

The "360 employee" approach: Employees do not log off from their lives when they log into work. They are parents, spouses, and caregivers. A corporate email during Mental Health Awareness Week is not a strategy. True support means creating a culture where early disclosure is safe and constructive.
Virtual GP services: Mind and body are made from the same clay. Offering Virtual GPs allows employees to manage physical ailments before they manifest as mental strain, bypassing the traditional friction of booking appointments around work hours.
Financial wellbeing: Mental health and financial anxiety are deeply intertwined. Providing robust financial wellbeing tools, and benefits such as life assurance and critical illness, offer employees the foundational peace of mind they need to focus and thrive.
Embedding benefits into your organisation: Offering counselling and resilience support is only worth doing if it is well promoted. It’s important to empower your line managers to signpost and guide employees, as well as promote wellbeing benefits throughout the year, linking this to employee life events. It’s also key to embed a support framework into sickness absence processes, ensuring all routes increase engagement to the supports available.
Use your data: Your benefits providers will usually share management information with you. This can support you in determining what your key focus areas should be, ensuring you’re making data led benefit decisions that will make an impact and demonstrate value.

The bottom line

Getting this right means actively improving employee health and wellbeing, boosting employee engagement, reducing sickness absence along with improving employee performance among other key areas.

It is time to stop viewing mental health support as a passive, outsourced perk and start treating it as a core business strategy.

Take action

Don't wait for your absence rates to signal a problem. Review your current wellbeing benefits today and bridge the gaps between your physical and mental health provisions, and equip your managers to lead with empathy.