Mental Health at Work: What Every Manager Needs to Know

A team may appear productive on paper while actually nearing capacity limits. Deadlines are still being met; meetings are still being held, and performance numbers may look acceptable. But behind those numbers, employees may be answering messages later at night, struggling to concentrate, withdrawing from conversations, or taking longer to complete work that once came easily.

The scale of the issue is difficult to dismiss. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found that 40% of employees worldwide experienced a lot of stress during the previous day in 2025. At the same time, global employee engagement fell to 20%, down from its 23% peak in 2022. Gallup estimates that low engagement has cost the global economy approximately USD 10 trillion in lost productivity, or 9% of global GDP.

These numbers put mental health at work in a different category. It is increasingly connected to how managers lead, how teams operate, and whether employees have the capacity to sustain good work. Mental health outcomes increasingly depend on leadership choices that shape daily work conditions.

Why Managers Sit at the Center of This Shift

Leadership shapes the daily experience of work more than almost anything else. APA’s 2025 findings suggest that the manager relationship is more than a workplace satisfaction issue. Workers who were satisfied with their relationship with their manager were far less likely to describe their workplace as toxic than those who were dissatisfied, at 10% versus 55%. They were also less likely to report that things felt uncertain at work, at 31% versus 66%.

Managers decide how priorities get set, how feedback gets delivered, how work assignments are shared or allocated, and whether people feel safe enough to raise a concern before it becomes a crisis. Protecting mental health at work therefore means managing the actual conditions people operate under.

This matters most as companies grow. Stress increases when teams grow faster than support systems can handle, and more work paired with more complexity quickly exposes any weak spot in how a team is managed. The U.S. Surgeon General’s workplace well-being framework identifies protection from harm, connection, work-life harmony, a sense of mattering, and opportunity for growth as the core components of a healthy workplace. Each of these depends directly on choices leaders make about how work gets designed and distributed.

Gallup’s latest findings also point directly to the manager’s role. Manager engagement has dropped nine percentage points since 2022. The biggest year-over-year decline came between 2024 and 2025, when manager engagement fell five points, from 27% to 22%. Gallup says lower manager engagement accounts for most of the recent decline in overall employee engagement.

The Signals Leaders Should Pay Attention To

Burnout rarely announces itself at once. It tends to build quietly through small shifts in behavior that are easy to miss unless someone is paying attention. A few patterns worth watching for on a team include:

• Slower response times from people who are normally dependable
• Lower participation in meetings or group discussions
• A rise in mistakes or rework that did not use to happen
• Withdrawal, irritability, or a noticeable drop in initiative
• Urgent requests becoming the default pace rather than the exception

The American Psychological Association’s 2025 Work in America survey shows why leaders need to pay attention to the conditions behind these signals. 54% of U.S. workers said job insecurity had a significant impact on their stress levels at work. The survey also found that 59% of workers who described their workplace as uncertain said their work environment negatively affected their mental health, compared with 18% of those who felt their workplace was certain.

The same APA findings show a strong connection between the manager relationship and how employees experience their workplace. Only 10% of employees who were satisfied with their relationship with their manager described their workplace as toxic, compared with 55% of those who were dissatisfied. Satisfaction with the manager relationship was also associated with lower reports of workplace uncertainty, at 31% versus 66%.

What Employees Are Actually Carrying into the Workday

The stress employees bring to work rarely starts at their desk. On any given Monday, people log in carrying financial pressure, caregiving responsibilities, and a compounding sense of disconnection, even in workplaces that look constantly connected on the surface. For many, the workday effectively begins in the middle of the night, worrying about a bill, an aging parent, or a child who needs more support than there is time to give.

None of this shows up on a performance dashboard, yet it shapes how people show up every day regardless. A high performer might still be delivering results while running on far less energy than the work actually requires. A manager might be holding an entire team together while quietly running on empty themselves. This reflects a broader trend. It reflects the broader reality of today’s workforce, and ignoring it does not make the underlying pressure disappear.

Gallup found that only 34% of employees globally were thriving in 2025, while 56% were struggling and 9% were suffering. Although the global thriving rate improved by one percentage point in 2025, Gallup notes that negative daily emotions among workers remain elevated compared with pre-pandemic levels.

The pressure is not limited to individual contributors. Gallup found that higher-level leaders reported substantially more negative emotions than individual contributors: they were seven points more likely to report experiencing a lot of stress, 12 points more likely to report anger, 11 points more likely to report sadness, and 10 points more likely to report loneliness the previous day.

Understanding this personal stress context highlights why leadership is critical.

A Model Worth Learning From

Ameriprise Bank offers a useful example of what this looks like in practice. Working with the nonprofit CHC: Creating Healthier Communities, the company piloted a three-part webinar series called Mental Health Mondays during Mental Health Awareness month, and the approach behind it holds lessons for almost any organization trying to move beyond surface-level wellness programming.

The series started by acknowledging the specific pressures financial services professionals face, rather than defaulting to generic advice that could apply to any industry. It brought in credible outside expertise, including the American Psychiatric Association Foundation and NAMI, so employees heard from people who understand mental health from a clinical and community perspective rather than only a corporate one.

Sessions were built to be interactive rather than one-way presentations, giving employees room to ask questions directly, and normalize conversations that often stay hidden because of stigma. Perhaps most importantly, senior leaders visibly participated alongside their teams, signaling that this was a shared responsibility rather than a message handed down from above and forgotten.

Building a Workplace That is Sustainable Under Pressure

Understaffed teams offer a clear example of how burnout often gets misread as a morale problem when it is actually a capacity problem. When the same small group of people is consistently covering too many roles, no amount of encouragement fixes the underlying math. Recognizing team strain as a sign that the business may have outgrown its current structure, rather than assuming people simply need to try harder, is an important leadership skill.

The manager data from Gallup makes this especially relevant. In 2025, 79% of managers in Gallup’s best-practice organizations were engaged at work, nearly four times the global average. This shows that low manager engagement is not inevitable and that organizations can create management environments where leaders are substantially more engaged.

Companies serious about workplace mental health are building it into how work gets designed from the outset, through clearer expectations, better manager training, and staffing decisions that do not quietly assume people will absorb whatever gets added to their plate. This is not simply good practice ahead of moments like World Mental Health Day on October 10, 2026. It reflects a genuine shift in how leadership itself is being defined, where the quality of a leader is measured partly by whether their team can sustain good work over time rather than only by what gets delivered this quarter.

Conclusion

When employees feel genuinely supported, they show up differently. They stay more focused, more engaged, and more connected to the people around them. That outcome benefits people first, and it happens to be good for business as well. Organizations that treat mental health and leadership as connected rather than separate conversations are better positioned to create working conditions where people can maintain high-quality work without continually exhausting their capacity.