Take action to support the people who support everyone else
Take action to support the people who support everyone else
Michel Ma, Advisory Programme Manager at Business in the Community, explores how organisations can better support managers to improve workplace mental health.
This year’s Mental Health Awareness Week challenges us to take action, not just raise awareness. That means focusing on how mental health is experienced and supported in the workplace.
Across organisations, line managers play a critical role in shaping employee wellbeing. They are often the first to notice when someone is struggling, the primary contact during sickness absence, and the link between organisational policies and human experience. But as expectations of line managers grow, an important question is increasingly hard to ignore: if line managers are holding everyone else, who is holding them?
The key role of line managers
Recent UK Government research1 highlights the pivotal role of line managers in shaping workplace culture. It shows that empathetic and supportive line managers are strongly linked to positive employee experiences and effective wellbeing support. Where this was lacking, employees were more likely to report unmet needs and a less inclusive working environment, even when wider support mechanisms such as occupational health were available.
At the same time, the research also highlights a significant pressure point: for many employees, the line manager was effectively the only source of support. Broader organisational systems, such as occupational health, policies and processes, or senior leadership involvement, were often invisible or inconsistent.
This finding reinforces the importance of good line managers, but it also exposes the strain placed on managers when responsibility outpaces support.
Support for managers and its limits
We hear common challenges from many line managers when it comes to supporting their teams:
This pressure is reflected in Business in the Community (BITC)’s Prioritise People: The Next Step report,2 where 65% of managers reported having to prioritise organisational interests over team wellbeing. The Great Place to Work UK Wellbeing Report 20253 similarly describes frontline managers as a “squeezed middle”, reporting higher stress levels than both senior leaders and individual contributors due to demands from above and below.
While organisations often recognise the need to support line managers, the focus is frequently on their capability to support others rather than on supporting the managers themselves. Fewer than a third (29%) provide line managers with mental health training, according to the CIPD Health and Wellbeing at Work 2025 report.4 Where this training is in place, managers report greater confidence in supporting employees.
However, training alone cannot compensate for unmanageable workloads, poor job design or lack of organisational backing.
From individual to system
UK evidence consistently shows that poor mental health is closely linked to work design, workload, autonomy, role clarity and how change is managed, all of which sit largely outside a line manager’s direct control.5,6 If Mental Health Awareness Week is genuinely about taking action, that action must go beyond individuals and address the systems in which people work.
Adopting a holistic approach to work and wellbeing, such as BITC’s Workwell Model, helps organisations rebalance responsibility by addressing the root causes of pressure, rather than relying on line managers to absorb them. BITC’s Workwell Model emphasises that wellbeing is shaped by job design, organisational culture, and the systems that govern everyday decisions, not just by individual behaviour or resilience.
By embedding wellbeing across job design, organisational culture, leadership behaviours and fair, enabling systems, organisations can remove many of the structural issues that currently land on managers’ shoulders. Instead, managers operate within systems that support both their teams and themselves. This shift does more than help managers cope: it reduces the need for coping in the first place, creating the conditions for healthier, more sustainable work for everyone.
Take action together
Reforming workplace wellbeing cannot be achieved by individuals alone. It requires collective leadership and intentional design. This Mental Health Awareness Week, organisations can take action by:
To support this journey, organisations are encouraged to complete the Workwell Self-Assessment Tool. More than 200 organisations have already used it to benchmark their approach to wellbeing. The tool gives a clear view of a business’ current maturity and where action will have the greatest impact, based on real comparative insight across organisations.
And as part of Mental Health Awareness Week, we also encourage organisations that are serious about taking action to join BITC’s Wellbeing Leadership Team. The Leadership Team brings together senior leaders committed to positioning health and wellbeing, particularly mental health, as strategic priorities, working collaboratively through evidence-based insight and shared learning. By joining, organisations can help shape our upcoming campaign on creating environments where line managers can thrive and contribute to practical, system-level action that supports sustainable work and healthier workplaces.
Because when managers are properly supported, structurally and culturally, they are far better placed to support everyone else.
