You care about your people. That much is clear because I don’t think you’d be reading this if you didn’t.
But caring about your team’s mental health and knowing how to act on that care are two different things. And somewhere between “I want to help” and “let me help,” it’s easy to stumble into territory that feels uncomfortable (potentially for all parties involved), or, however well-intentioned, like an intrusion.
There are some lines that should simply not be crossed. You are not your team’s therapist. You don’t need to know what’s happening in their personal lives, what they’ve discussed with a counsellor, or the specifics of what they’re struggling with. Your job isn’t to fix all issues. It’s to create an environment where they feel safe enough to take care of themselves and to make sure they know what help they have access to.
Here’s what that can look like.
Start with what you model
Culture flows downward. Before you introduce any wellbeing initiative or support channel, take an honest look at the signals you’re already sending.
If you’re sending Slack messages on Sunday evenings, your team gets the message even if you add “no need to reply until Monday.” If you’re visibly burning through lunch breaks, working late, and wearing your exhaustion like a badge, the unspoken norm becomes: this is what dedication looks like here.
Some of the most powerful things you can do as a manager or business owner cost nothing and require no programme to implement:
- Don’t contact staff outside of working hours and when you do need to send something late, use the scheduling feature so it lands on Monday morning, not Saturday night. I know someone who will read a late night message and spend hours turning it over in their mind, unable to settle or rest, until they finally get the relief of replying on Monday.
- Don’t expect after-hours responses and make your expectation explicit. Don’t assume people will understand that it’s implied.
- Take your own leave visibly and without guilt.
- Talk about rest as a value and not a reward for productivity.
These are actually backed by data. Microsoft’s WorkLab research found a 69% increase in after-hours chats per person among Teams users, with after-hours activity consistently linked to higher stress and reduced recovery from work.1 A separate study found that the more frequently employees received work emails outside of working hours, the worse their sleep quality and psychological detachment from work.2
Your team is watching what you do far more than they’re listening to what you say.
Check in on the climate, not just the tasks
Most one-to-ones are project updates dressed up as conversations. I know it’s needed but there’s also enormous value in occasionally slowing down and asking: how is everyone actually doing?
A climate check-in doesn’t have to be formal or lengthy. It can be as simple as opening a team meeting with a round of “one word for how you’re arriving today” and taking time to receive the answers. It can be creating space in your regular catch-ups to ask something beyond the to-do list: What’s draining your cup right now? What’s giving you energy?
When people feel seen and heard at work, they’re more likely to say something early, before things escalate.
Validate what you hear even when you can’t fix it. “That sounds really hard” can be received more wholesomely than jumping to find solutions.
Make the support visible and easy to reach
One of the most common barriers to people using wellbeing support is not knowing it exists, or not knowing how to access it.
If your team has access to coaching, an EAP, mental health days, or any other form of support, say so regularly and plainly. Don’t announce it once in a staff meeting and assume it’s absorbed or people know where to access it. Mention it in onboarding. Drop a reminder in your team channel. Include it in your newsletter. Put it somewhere people will actually find it when they need it.
Reach out without asking for the details
If you notice someone seems quieter than usual, less engaged, or like they’re not quite themselves, you don’t need to wait for them to come to you. You can go to them.
A simple message like “Hey, I’ve noticed you’ve seemed a bit flat lately. I just wanted to check in. You don’t have to tell me anything, but I’m here if you want to talk, and I want to make sure you know what support is available” can be enough to remind someone that they haven’t gone unnoticed.
You’re not asking for their medical history. You’re not diagnosing anything. You’re just sharing your observations and opening a door to support.
Give them permission to rest
Your high-achievers, your deeply committed team members, your people who pride themselves on never dropping a ball, sometimes need to hear you explicitly say: it’s okay to slow down.
Hard workers often struggle to give themselves permission to rest. They push through, minimise what they’re experiencing and keep going long after they should have stepped back. They don’t want to let anyone down or be the reason things are standing still or going awry.
That’s a lot of pressure they have on their shoulders. If you’re their manager, you can change that narrative. Tell them directly:
“I’d rather you take a day now than burn out in three months. Please use what’s available to you. It’s there for a reason.”
Say it in a one-to-one. Put it in writing. However it lands, the message is the same: taking care of yourself is what we want for you here.
Normalise the conversation in the absence of a crisis
Mental health tends to enter workplace conversations at the worst possible moment: when someone is already struggling, already overwhelmed, already past the point of being able to ask for help easily. By then, the conversation feels loaded and harder to have.
The antidote is to make it ordinary before it’s urgent.
The numbers make clear why this matters. According to the 2026 NAMI/Ipsos Workplace Mental Health Poll, three in four employees say it’s appropriate to discuss mental health at work yet nearly half still worry they would be judged for doing so.3 The gap between what people think is acceptable and what they’re willing to risk is where stigma lives. Normalise the conversation by weaving mental health into the everyday language of your workplace so that when someone does need to say something, it doesn’t feel like they’re breaking glass.
You can do this by mentioning your own experience appropriately and briefly. “I’ve been finding the pace a bit much lately, so I’m building in a slower morning on Fridays” is a small moment of reality that gives your team permission to change things up for their own wellbeing.
It also means talking about wellbeing support at normal moments and not only the difficult ones. Mentioning coaching or mental health resources in a team update when nothing is wrong communicates wellbeing is important.
The goal is a team where someone can say “I’m not doing great this week” without it feeling like a confession of a crime.
Create safety around mistakes
A significant amount of workplace anxiety lives in this question: what happens here when something goes wrong?
For many people, that question runs in the background constantly and is shaping how much they take on, how honestly they communicate, how much energy they spend managing perception rather than doing their best work. Fear of getting it wrong is exhausting in a way that’s hard to measure and easy to miss.
As a leader, you have more influence over this than you might think. You can change what happens in the moments after things go wrong.
When a mistake happens, and it will, the response that builds psychological safety is one that separates the problem from the person. It asks “what happened and what do we do now?” rather than “whose fault is this?”. It acknowledges that things go wrong in teams doing real, complex work, and that the point is to learn and move forward, not to assign blame.
Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who pioneered research into psychological safety, found that teams with high psychological safety demonstrate greater learning behaviour and better performance and that this effect is directly linked to how leaders respond when things go wrong.4 More recent research by Edmondson and colleagues found that psychological safety also reduces burnout and increases employee retention, particularly during periods of pressure and uncertainty.5
A team that isn’t braced for consequences is a team that can actually breathe and do their work.
A note on professional support
All of the above will help but none of it replaces the value of proper wellbeing support. Managers and business owners can create conditions, but they’re not trained practitioners, and they shouldn’t have to be.
If you’re thinking about what meaningful support looks like for your team, the question isn’t whether it’s worth it. It’s whether the support you’re offering is human, confidential, and actually reaching the people who need it.
At Still Willows, that’s exactly what we’re here for.
Still Willows provides confidential mental wellness coaching for small teams. If you’re thinking about how to better support your people, we’d love to talk.
References
- Microsoft WorkLab. (2021). 6 Principles for Hybrid Work Wellbeing. Microsoft. microsoft.com
- Kubo, T., Izawa, S., Ikeda, H., Tsuchiya, M., Miki, K., & Takahashi, M. (2021). Work e-mail after hours and off-job duration and their association with psychological detachment, actigraphic sleep, and saliva cortisol: A 1-month observational study for information technology employees. Journal of Occupational Health, 63(1). doi.org
- NAMI & Ipsos. (2026). 2026 NAMI/Ipsos Workplace Mental Health Poll. National Alliance on Mental Illness. ipsos.com
- Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. doi.org
- Edmondson, A. C., Kerrissey, M., & Bahadurzada, H. (2025). In Tough Times, Psychological Safety Is an Asset, Not a Luxury. Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. library.hbs.edu