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REVIEW article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Occupational Health and Safety
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1552981
Mental Health at Work: A Practical Framework for Employers
Provisionally accepted- 1One Mind at Work, Rutherford, United States
- 2Columbia University, New York City, New York, United States
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Mental health is a universal issue critical not only to individual health and well-being, but also to workforce sustainability and organizational performance. Leaders increasingly understand the imperative to support workers’ mental health but are often unsure of where to start or how to prioritize their actions. Numerous guidance documents for employers have emerged in recent years, but without conducting their own needs and risk assessment and evaluating the policies and practices they have in place, employers are left unaware of specific risks their workers face, effectiveness of their current practices, and actions they could take that would have the greatest positive impact. To address this gap, Columbia University's Mental Health + Work Design Lab, mental health non-profit One Mind at Work, and corporate ethical standards measurement company Ethisphere partnered to develop a comprehensive framework and corresponding self-assessment to help employers evaluate their organizational-level workforce mental health efforts and strategically invest in evidence-based practices. In this article, we detail the range of organizational-level practices necessary to effectively support and advance workforce mental health and present a framework for assessing and improving these efforts.
Keywords: Occupational mental health, worker wellbeing, performance, Mental Health, Work design, Workplace interventions, framework, best practices
Received: 29 Dec 2024; Accepted: 09 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ballard, Lodge and Pike. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: David W Ballard, One Mind at Work, Rutherford, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.