Building a Resilient Workforce: 7 Strategies to Prioritize Mental Health in the Workplace

Ahead of World Mental Health Day on 10 October 2026, the group's latest survey finds that 57% of organisations now provide initiatives designed to help employees manage stress, mental health, and resilience. That figure is more than a press release talking point. It signals a measurable shift toward prevention rather than reactive care, which is where both the clinical benefit and the cost savings tend to live, at least in theory.

The preventive pivot, in numbers

GRiD's data shows that nearly a third of employers (31%) now prioritise preventative health and wellbeing support, compared with just 21% who focus primarily on helping staff once they are already ill. Mental health leads the pack at 57%, followed by financial health support (such as planning and debt consolidation) at 40%, with other categories trailing behind. The framing matters here, because when 57% of employers describe mental health as "prevention," that language shapes which interventions get funded, which get measured, and which quietly disappear into an EAP brochure nobody opens.

The practical toolkit behind this 57% typically includes employee assistance programmes, counselling access, and specialist mental health services delivered through group risk benefits: employer-sponsored life assurance, income protection, and critical illness cover. Katharine Moxham, spokesperson for GRiD, framed the trend as a positive move toward early intervention, noting that prevention reduces the impact of ill-health on both the individual and the business, and that World Mental Health Day is a useful moment to remind staff what support exists and how to actually access it.

What employees should actually verify

Here is where a dose of clinical skepticism serves the reader better than the official narrative. A "preventative mental health programme" on paper is not the same as a clinically validated one. Employees are right to ask three things before assuming their employer's offering carries any real efficacy: what specific interventions are funded, and whether any third-party clinical evidence sits behind them; whether access to specialist support is genuinely low-friction or gated by lengthy intake and assessment processes; and how outcomes are tracked over time. If the only metric your employer can report is "number of EAP logins," the prevention claim is largely decorative.

GRiD also notes that mental wellbeing does not exist in isolation, and that financial, physical, and social wellbeing each feed into it. For employees, the most useful question is not "does my employer offer mental health support" but "which of my actual stressors does this support address, and is the route to using it short enough that I will reach for it before I burn out." The 57% figure tells you what is on the menu. It tells you very little about whether any of it works.