Five steps: Close the waiting gap in workplace mental health
The mental health support provision for an employee doesn’t begin when a therapy session starts. It begins when someone first decides they need help.
The period in between, what could be called the “waiting gap”, is where an employee has spoken to a manager, visited their GP or looked for support, but is still waiting for the right intervention.
It matters to the employee and to your organisation because mental health difficulties do not pause while someone waits for support to be given.
Stress, withdrawal, low mood or anxiety can gradually become harder to manage, affecting sleep, concentration, relationships and someone’s sense of being able to cope at work.
ONS figures show that 148.8 million working days were lost because of sickness or injury in 2025, with mental health conditions accounting for 8.9 per cent of sickness absence occurrences.
So how can HR teams close this gap? Here are five practical steps.
Step one: Understand the waiting gap in your organisation
Most organisations can report how many employees used a wellbeing benefit last quarter. Far fewer can say how long those employees waited between asking for help and speaking to a clinician.
Start by mapping your employee journey. When does someone first disclose that they are struggling? When is a referral made? And when does an initial clinical assessment take place?
The time between that first request and the first clinical assessment gives you a clearer picture of your organisation’s waiting gap.
You cannot improve a pathway you cannot see. Once you have a baseline, conversations with healthcare providers can move from general reassurance to a clearer understanding of where delays may be occurring.
Step two: Give line managers a clear route into support
Once someone discloses that they are struggling, most line managers want to help that individual quickly and appropriately.
Without a clear route into clinical support, however, the line manager can end up holding responsibility for something they were never trained to manage.
That creates unfair pressure on the manager and can leave the employee they are caring for without the specialist help they need. This can create further resentment for the employee and disillusionment about the process for the manager.
The solution does not need to be complicated. Managers should have a clear route into support, covering:
- Who they should contact
- What they should say in the moment
- What they should not promise
- What happens next.
Managers do not need to assess or diagnose. They need to know where the door is and how to help someone walk through it.
Start by mapping your employee journey. When does someone first disclose that they are struggling? When is a referral made? And when does an initial clinical assessment take place?
Step three: Treat triage as a clinical decision, not an administrative one
Employees describe distress in everyday language. Someone may say they are stressed, burnt out, not coping or anxious. Those words can mean very different things clinically.
Behind them may be work-related pressure, trauma, grief, depression, obsessive thinking, panic, neurodiversity-related stress, health anxiety or several of these at once.
An intake process that simply records the words and allocates a standard session block risks sending people down the wrong route.
Ask your external healthcare provider two questions:
- Who carries out the initial health assessment and what clinical qualification do they hold?
- What does the assessment consider beyond presenting symptoms, including duration, risk and complexity?
This is what separates rapid access from rushed care. Speed is only useful when it sits alongside proper clinical judgement.
Step four: Check that your provision offers more than one type of therapy
A one-size-fits-all approach can leave support available but poorly matched to the individual, delaying recovery and increasing frustration.
An employee experiencing anxiety, rumination or panic may benefit from cognitive behavioural therapy. This can help them understand the relationship between thoughts and feelings and identify the patterns keeping the difficulty going.
Another employee processing grief, stress or a major life change may need a counselling-focused approach, where the therapeutic relationship itself is an important part of the work.
Someone affected by trauma may need trauma-focused therapy, or eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR), delivered by clinicians specifically trained for it, because generic support may not be enough.
Ask your provider how different referrals are being matched to different approaches. If provision is heavily weighted towards one, it is worth asking whether the service is being shaped by capacity rather than the needs of the people using it.
An intake process that simply records the words and allocates a standard session block risks sending people down the wrong route
Step five: Measure outcomes, not just uptake
The referral volume tells you that people found the front door. It says much less about whether the support worked. Track completion rates, clinical outcome measures and absence patterns before and after intervention.
It is also important to understand when support has not been enough. Including cases requiring onward referral or where an employee disengages partway.
The Government’s Keep Britain Working review describes targeted early support as rapid access to help for common conditions, including early-stage mental health problems, bridging the gap between clinical care and workplace support.
The framing is useful for HR teams because it puts the emphasis in the right place.
The benefit of rapid access is not simply that an employee is seen sooner. It is that they are more likely to be guided towards support that fits their actual need, before difficulties escalate to the point where absence becomes unavoidable.
When someone asks for help, the response they receive shapes whether they feel supported, dismissed or left to manage alone.
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