Research shows that mental health training for line managers leads to better business performance

A survey of thousands of businesses in England found that mental health training for line managers delivered organisational benefits, including reduced long-term sickness absence due to mental health problems and improved business performance, customer service and recruitment and retention.

The project was led by Professor Holly Blake from the University of Nottingham and Dr Juliet Hassard from Queen’s University Belfast, UK, who present these findings in the open access journal PLOS ONE on July 17th.

Mental health training for line managers aims to equip them with skills to support the mental health of the people they manage. There is ongoing research into whether such training increases the knowledge, skills and confidence of managers to support their staff and benefits employees. However, few studies have investigated the potential business value for companies.

To explore the benefits at the organizational level, Hassard, Blake and colleagues analyzed anonymized survey data from several thousand companies in England, collected between 2020 and 2023 by Warwick Business School’s Enterprise Research Centre.

The survey included questions about the companies’ mental health and wellbeing practices, including whether they offered mental health training to line managers. To avoid bias in their analysis, the researchers statistically controlled for the age, sector and size of the companies.

The analysis found that mental health training for line managers was associated with significantly better outcomes in terms of business performance, customer service and staff recruitment and retention. Having line managers trained in mental health was also linked to lower levels of long-term sickness absence due to mental health problems.

These results suggest that mental health training for line managers can have strategic business value for companies. Based on their findings, the researchers recommend that organizations provide mental health training to line managers and implement workplace policies that clarify the role of line managers in supporting employee mental health.

Meanwhile, the researchers stress the need for further research in this area, including analyses based on objective data rather than subjective survey responses, and a comparison of the potential benefits of different approaches to mental health training for line managers.

Blake added: “Across businesses of different types, sizes and sectors, we found that training line managers in mental health was linked to improved recruitment and retention, customer service, business performance and reduced long-term sickness absence due to mental health. This is the first study to show that training line managers in mental health is linked to improved business performance.”