Awareness isn't enough. Here's what action actually looks like.

Every May, organisations do something interesting.

They put up posters. They share resources. They remind people that it's okay not to be okay. Some even bring in speakers (hello!!). And all of that is good. Awareness matters.

But here's what I notice, year after year, working with organisations across almost every sector: the awareness hasn't translated into action. Not the kind of action that actually prevents people from becoming unwell in the first place.

Because the action most organisations take is focused on the individual.

A mindfulness app. A resilience workshop. A reminder to use the EAP. An email from the CEO reminding everyone to take a lunch break. (While simultaneously sending a 7pm Slack message. But I digress...)

These things aren't useless. But on their own, they treat the symptom while the cause keeps running unchecked.

The problem is usually the system, not the person

I work with a lot of organisations where good, capable, motivated people are underperforming. Not because they're not trying. Not because they need more resilience training (do not get me started!!!) But because they've been placed in an environment that is quietly, constantly activating their nervous system.

Back-to-back meetings with no time to think.

Everything marked urgent. All fifteen of this week's priorities.

Ambiguity about what's actually expected of them.

A culture where raising concerns (or saying I'm struggling) feels risky.

Each of these things, on its own, doesn't feel like a deal breaker. But together, they create a workplace where people are in a low-level state of stress almost ALL OF THE TIME! Their nervous systems are constantly activated. And a brain in survival mode cannot think clearly, collaborate well, or do its best work (it's got more important things to focus on...survival!)

We can call this disengagement, or burnout, or poor performance.

But often it's simply what happens when you don't give people a fighting chance.

The necessary vs the unnecessary

There's a distinction I talk about a lot: necessary stress versus unnecessary stress.

Necessary stress is real. A deadline. A difficult client. A period of high demand. A bit of adrenaline to get through a challenging week. That's normal. That's part of work. And in small doses - it's ok!

Unnecessary stress is different. It's the ambiguity, the too many conflicting priorities, the unclear expectations, the constant low level noise that keeps nervous systems in fight or flight mode on a completely average Tuesday.

When I ask people in organisations what creates most of their stress at work, the answers are almost always the same: too many meetings, everything feeling urgent, never knowing what to prioritise, being told one thing and experiencing another.

None of that is inevitable. A lot of it is fixable.

So what does action actually look like?

This is where I think Mental Health Awareness Month has a real opportunity this year. Not just awareness. ACTION!

And not action aimed at helping individuals cope better with broken systems. Action aimed at the systems themselves.

Here are three things organisations can actually do:

Audit the unnecessary stressors

Ask your teams: what is creating stress for you right now that we could actually change?

Not what can we give you to manage it. What can we strip out?!!

People will say workload -- and they mean it. But when you dig deeper, it's rarely the actual work that's the problem. It's everything layered on top of it. The meetings that could have been emails. The constantly shifting priorities. The lack of clarity about what actually matters.

Strip out the noise and the workload often becomes manageable. It's the nonsense, the noise and the bullsh*t that breaks people, not the work itself.

Look at your culture of urgency

Everything being urgent means nothing is urgent. When every request is marked critical and every deadline is yesterday, people stop trusting the signals.

They stop being able to prioritise. And they stay in a permanent state of low level anxiety because they genuinely don't know what matters most.

Fixing this is free. It just requires someone with authority to say: not everything is a crisis.

Normalise recovery

Not as a wellbeing perk. As part of how high performance works. Sprint and recovery is how human beings are designed to operate. Organisations that treat rest as laziness and constant busyness as a badge of honour are not creating high performance. They're slowly degrading it. The most impactful thing a leader can do this month is model what recovery actually looks like.

The action that changes everything

Mental health at work doesn't get better through awareness alone. It gets better when organisations are honest about the conditions they're creating and are willing to change them.

That's harder than putting up a poster, It requires leaders to look at their own behaviour, their own culture, their own ways of working and ask: are we part of the problem?

The good news is that the changes that make the biggest difference don't have to be expensive. But they do require genuine commitment - from leaders who are willing to look honestly at what they're creating and do the work to change it.

That might look like clearer expectations. Fewer, better meetings. Permission to not be available at 11pm. One leader in one team choosing to model something different.

None of it is complicated. None of it costs money. But it does require people to actually mean it.

The ripple effect of that is bigger than most organisations realise.

So this May, by all means raise awareness. But then do something about what you find.

If this resonated, there's plenty more to explore. On my FREE RESOURCES PAGE  you'll find podcasts, short videos and downloadable guides on performance, psychological safety and the science of why people do their best work.

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