Something appears to have shifted in how serious organizations are thinking about mental health at work—and it’s worth paying attention to.
For a long time, workplace well-being occupied a specific corner of organizational life. Often considered important but far from critical, it was often seen as an afterthought. At worst, it was judged irrelevant to growth and commercial performance.
What’s changing, according to a recent piece in Forbes by Dr. Michele Nealon, President of The Chicago School, is where mental health support now sits in the organizational hierarchy.
It’s moved from a benefit to an intentionally designed infrastructure piece.
The article cites McKinsey’s Health Institutewhich estimates that every dollar invested in mental health interventions has the potential to return five. Their findings show that absenteeism rose 33% in 2023. And 81% of employees now factor mental health support into decisions about where to work — and whether to stay.
For anyone leading teams or shaping culture, the question therefore shifts from ‘do we offer wellbeing support?’ to ‘are the conditions we’ve designed enabling a sustainable business model?’.
What’s interesting about Nealon’s framing is the concept of a “mental health economy” — the idea that organizational success is increasingly tied to how well leaders model and integrate well-being into everyday operations, decision-making and culture.
How we design work
This perspective moves the conversation away from programs and benefits towards something more structural: how we design work.
The Chicago School’s own experience points to one practical implication of this. Their shift was to build participatory models — involving faculty, staff and students directly in designing their working environment. Nealon points out that the World Health Organization connects this kind of inclusive approach to a 74% reduction in burnout.
It’s not complicated: people who have some agency in how they work tend to fare better than those who don’t.
One pattern we notice repeatedly in our work is the moment teams are given shared ownership of something (in our case the co-creation of a song) their behaviour shifts. The connective energy in the room buzzes. Designing a time and place like this for unrestricted ideas and contributions to flow also sends a powerful signal that each individual matters.
For business and team leaders, HR directors and CEOs, the harder question is one of accountability. Nealon is direct about the mental health factor though, convinced it’s no longer purely an individual resilience issue. Culture, leadership behaviors and system design all shape the conditions people work within. Access to an Employee Assistance Program matters, but on its own it doesn’t create psychological safety or sustained performance. That requires something more consistent: leaders who model boundaries, creating space for honest feedback and designing roles and workflows with human limitations in mind.
None of this is particularly radical. But there’s a gap between knowing it and building organizations around it.
Stories like this suggest those institutions most likely to navigate the next decade of workforce complexity— rising expectations, talent competition, the ongoing aftermath of pandemic-era burnout — are likely to be those treating mental health as a structural issue rather than a supplementary one.
Not because it’s the right thing to do (though it is), but because the cost of not doing so is becoming measurable in higher absenteeism rates, rising mental health support costs and increasingly sophisticated HR tracking tools and metrics. That measurement is getting both harder to overlook and clearly more detrimental to innovation, adaptability and profit margins.
That seems worth thinking about, whatever sector you’re in.
