Unlocking the business value of mental health training for line managers

A study of several thousand companies in England has shown that mental health training for managers is associated with benefits at the organisational level, including reduced long-term mental ill health and better business performance, better customer service and better recruitment and retention. The project was led by Professor Holly Blake of the University of Nottingham and Dr Juliet Hassard of Queen’s University Belfast, UK, who present these findings on 17 July in the open access journal PLOS ONE.

Mental health training for line managers aims to equip them with skills to support the mental health of those they manage. Ongoing research is examining whether such training improves managers’ knowledge, skills and confidence in supporting their staff and benefits employees. However, few studies have looked at the potential business benefits for organisations.

To examine the benefits at the organizational level, Hassard, Blake and colleagues analyzed anonymized survey data from several thousand companies in England collected between 2020 and 2023 by the Enterprise Research Centre at Warwick Business School.

The survey included questions about companies’ mental health and wellbeing practices, including whether they offered mental health training to their managers. To avoid errors in their analysis, the researchers statistically controlled for the age, sector and size of the companies.

The analysis found that mental health training for line managers was associated with significantly better outcomes in terms of business performance, customer service, and staff recruitment and retention. Mental health training for line managers was also associated with lower rates of long-term sickness absence due to mental health problems.

These results suggest that mental health training for supervisors can be of strategic value to organizations. Based on their findings, the researchers recommend that organizations provide mental health training for supervisors and implement operational policies that clarify the role of supervisors in supporting employees’ mental health.

At the same time, the researchers stress that further research is needed in this area, including analyses based on objective data rather than subjective survey responses, and a comparison of the potential benefits of different approaches to mental health training for line managers.

Blake adds: “Across organisations of different types, sizes and sectors, we found that training line managers in mental health is associated with better employee recruitment and retention, better customer service, better business performance and fewer long-term sick days due to mental ill health. This is the first study to show that training line managers in mental health is associated with better business outcomes.”

Journal reference:

1. Hassard J, Dulal-Arthur T, Bourke J, Wishart M, Roper S, Belt V, et al. (2024) The relationship between supervisor mental health training and organizational outcomes. PLoS ONE 19(7): e0306065. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0306065