Your mental health awareness week: Doing more harm than good?

Written by Harriette Luscombe from Coaches For Change

From 11 to 17 May, Birmingham’s offices will be filled with wellness snacks, one-off meditation classes, and mindfulness colouring books for Mental Health Awareness Week.

As a Behaviour Change Specialist, I’m going to share a hard truth: Tokenistic events often do more harm than good.

When we open a conversation about mental health without the infrastructure to support it, we don't build resilience, we build cynicism.

Here is the science behind why your "Awareness Week" might be backfiring, and what your workforce actually needs from you. Getting it right is essential for your retention, engagement, and innovation.

The local stakes: The cost of the "Chaos"

In the West Midlands, the "Chaos" isn't just an HR headache, it’s a major drain on your bottom line.

 While regional reports show a staggering £14bn total social cost (WMCA, 2024), the immediate impact on your balance sheet is more precise: Poor mental health now costs West Midlands employers an average of £1,700 per employee, per year (Deloitte, 2025).

For a Birmingham business with 50 staff, that is a potential £85,000 problem. When your team is "suffering in silence," you aren't just losing morale; you are losing cold, hard margin.

The "psychological peep-hole" effect

Research shows that 89 per cent of employees believe psychological safety is the top driver of innovation (McKinsey, 2025).

Furthermore, companies with highly engaged teams see a 23 per cent increase in profitability compared to those with poor work-life balance (Gallup, 2024).

However, tokenistic gestures like a one-off webinar followed by a 60-hour work week can create what I call a "psychological peep-hole."

You’ve invited vulnerability, but if the management system isn't equipped to handle it, that window slams shut. This erodes trust. In fact, a lack of genuine psychological safety is now recognised as a significant risk to physical safety in the workplace (British Safety Council, 2025).

What Gen Z and millennials are actually demanding

If you want to attract and keep top talent in the West Midlands, "awareness" isn't enough.

• The stress paradox: 40 per cent of Gen Z and 34 per cent of Millennials report feeling stressed or anxious all or most of the time (Deloitte, 2025).
• The value shift: Unlike previous generations, they aren't just looking for a paycheck. They prioritise meaning, autonomy, and soft skills (empathy and leadership) over traditional corporate ladders.
• The exit: Nearly half of these workers do not feel financially or emotionally secure. If the "wellness" support feels superficial, the risk is they simply "quiet quit," leave, or end up getting signed off.

Moving from meaningless tokens to effective strategies

To build a high-performing, healthy team, we have to stop treating mental health as a "campaign" and start treating it as a systemic audit.

There are two parts to this crucial change: firstly, understanding the outcome you want to achieve (the clarity) and secondly, understanding the behavioural science required to put those changes into action (the behaviour change).

The positive shift

The good news? Companies that shift from "awareness events" to a structural framework of human flourishing see a 21 per cent rise in employee retention (Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, 2024) and a significant boost in productivity.

What to do right now?

If your teams seem busier than ever, are moving from one crisis to the next, and have lost sight of the bigger goals - then you need an urgent rethink. Stop wellbeing appearing as a meaningless pillar on your brand values chart. Instead, try this (no additional budget required):

1. Review your wellbeing support as a whole (not a collection of random events). THe good news is you’re probably doing more than you think.
2. Check if you’ve allocated responsibility to anyone for your workplace wellbeing or if it’s falling through the gaps.
3. Audit your reality: Dust off the workplace engagement survey or, better yet, ask again with a focus on psychological safety.
4. Implement a process: Build a culture where psychological safety is an operational standard, not a weekly theme.
5. Don’t overlook your successes: Take a moment to make sure you’re celebrating in your teams and as a company the things you’re doing great at. Not everything will be perfect straight off the bat.

The goal isn't just to have a team that isn't ill. The goal is to have a team that is flourishing. This Mental Health Awareness Week, let’s move past the tokens and start building the systems that actually support the people driving your business forward.

Harriette Luscombe is a Behaviour Change Specialist and Positive Psychology Practitioner helping Birmingham businesses transition from Chaos to Clarity. Email: Harriette@coachesforchange.co.uk