Issue 011: Beyond the Duvet Day

Workers in process, plant and machine operative roles had the highest sickness absence rate of any occupation in Britain last year, 3.3%, more than three times the 1.0% rate among managers and directors, according to the ONS. Mental ill health is now the single biggest cause of long-term absence overall, cited in 41% of cases, per CIPD's 2025 survey, the worst figure in fifteen years. None of that fits neatly with a wellbeing strategy built around a duvet day and a poster in the break room, especially once you're managing people across sites that rarely see each other, or a shift pattern that never overlaps with when HR is in the building.

This week is about five employers who stopped treating a policy document as the finish line: one that trained over half its workforce to actually talk about it, one that gave people a door that closes on a warehouse floor, one that extended its support past its own payroll, one that borrowed a whole mental health infrastructure from a different industry, and one that built something physical because the app never reached the shop floor. Three Micro-Playbooks on the awareness gap that keeps frontline staff from ever hearing what's on offer, the difference between training a mental health first aider and actually supporting one, and the absence bill sitting quietly inside a spreadsheet nobody's cross-referencing.

Sally Jameson runs people strategy for exactly that kind of workforce. She's Head of People at L3 Group, a multi-site business spanning fibre network infrastructure, business services and more, with teams working out of sites in Seaham, Oldham, Manchester and Duns. She put it plainly in a recent post: "Mental health is about so much more than time off work." She joins The Work Life Reporter Live this Tuesday for a straight conversation about what that actually looks like once you get past the duvet day.

Welcome to the eleventh issue of The Work Life Reporter. This week you get:

Let’s get into it.

In February 2016, Skanska became one of the first construction companies to sign the Time to Change pledge and started training Mental Health First Aiders across its UK and US operations. A decade on, more than 55% of its employees have completed either the Mental Health Aware course or full Mental Health First Aid training, and every line manager and executive now has it as a mandatory requirement, not an optional extra.

The mechanism worth noting isn't the training itself, plenty of companies run a one-off session and call it done. It's that Skanska made spotting the signs of stress and anxiety, and pointing a colleague to its 24/7 counselling line, part of how the company actually runs a site. Tricia O'Neill, Skanska's Head of Health Risk Management, measures success in an unusually concrete way: "How do you measure success? I think the fact that I can stand in a coffee queue at Skanska and hear people talking about their mental health is the biggest testament." A contractor who used one of Skanska's mental health resource cards later called the Construction Industry Helpline to say no previous employer had ever given them anything like it.

Royal Mail launched its Mental Health First Aid programme in July 2016 and formalised it a year later under the strategy "Because Healthy Minds Matter." Over 2,100 staff have since trained through a simple three-step framework, ACT: Acknowledge the signs someone isn't themselves, Communicate by talking and listening, Take action by finding support. The part that makes it work on a delivery office floor rather than in a policy document: quiet rooms built into warehouse and depot spaces specifically for private conversations, because there's rarely anywhere else on a shop floor to have one.

Mick Wood, a postman of over 20 years and a Gulf War veteran managing his own depression and PTSD, trained through the programme via his union, the CWU. When a colleague, Caroline, went through a difficult period, Mick used what he'd learned to help her arrange reduced-hours rehabilitation work instead of taking sick leave outright, keeping her connected to the team rather than isolated at home. "MHFA taught me what to look out for," he said, "and as a result I'm much more empathetic" at spotting when someone's struggling. 96% of people who complete the training report it genuinely deepened their understanding of mental health, not just their awareness of the policy.

National Grid built its "Safe to Say" philosophy around a simple idea: colleagues should be able to speak up about what's affecting them, physically or mentally, without it becoming a bigger event than it needs to be. It backs that with a Thrive wellbeing app rolled out across the UK business in 2022 and mandatory mental health e-learning for every UK manager, currently at 87% completion. The part worth stealing is who the support extends to. National Grid's commitments explicitly cover the contractors working on its construction sites across the UK, not just its own direct employees, an unusual choice for a company whose actual infrastructure work is mostly delivered through contracted crews.

The honest number sits right alongside the programme, not hidden from it. Per Mind's Workplace Wellbeing Index, only 27% of National Grid colleagues currently say they feel comfortable discussing mental health at work. That's a company running a genuinely resourced programme and still finding that comfort hasn't caught up with access. It's worth sitting with, because it says the infrastructure of support and the culture that makes people use it are two different projects, and building the first doesn't automatically deliver the second.

Mates in Mind had spent years building its mental health support model specifically for construction, a sector with its own well documented crisis. In June 2020, Wincanton became the partnership that pulled it out of that single sector for the first time, bringing the charity's training and communication materials into transport and logistics instead, an industry with its own version of the same problem: drivers and warehouse staff spread across sites, working shifts that rarely put them in a room with HR.

"The mental wellbeing of our colleagues is a fundamental part of ensuring everyone at Wincanton can be at their best, both at home and at work," said Sally Austin, Wincanton's Chief HR Officer at the time. James Rudoni, Mates in Mind's Managing Director, called it a step toward a healthier and more sustainable way of working for the wider industry, not just the one company. The move is a reminder that a lot of mental health infrastructure already exists, built and tested somewhere else, and the fastest way to bring real support into a sector that's never had it is to import what already works rather than build a version from scratch.

Jaguar Land Rover rolled out a wellbeing app to its workforce like most large employers have. Engagement scores among its manufacturing teams came back "much lower" than among office staff, according to Dr Steve Iley, the company's Chief Medical Officer of Human Resources, because a digital tool built for someone at a desk all day doesn't reach someone on a production line for eight hours with their phone in a locker. JLR's answer wasn't a better app. It was six physical Centres for Wellbeing built across its UK manufacturing sites, designed to match the standard of its Gaydon head office, staffed by physiologists, counsellors and psychologists, and reachable three ways: an occupational health referral, self-enrolment, or a walk-up digital kiosk that takes a quick health reading on the spot.

The results are the part that should embarrass any company still treating an app as the whole strategy. The centres run a Net Promoter Score of plus 80. Employees returning to work after time off started the programme at a 54% success rate and left it at 78%, a jump JLR credits to the centres physically re-familiarising people with the workplace before they're expected to perform in it again. The programme won the Society of Occupational Medicine's Outstanding Occupational Health Initiative award in 2022, four years after Iley's team first noticed the app wasn't landing with the people who needed it most.

Frontline and shift-based employees report meaningfully worse mental health than their desk-based colleagues. One 2024 study found anxiety running 33% higher and depression 61% higher among frontline workers, and yet they're the least likely group to actually ask for help. The same study found frontline staff 30% less likely to seek support when stress hits, and 64% more likely to say outright they don't have a stress problem at all.

Most leaders read low uptake on an EAP or a wellbeing app as low need. It's closer to the opposite. Benefit awareness among frontline staff runs 22% lower than among desk-based colleagues, and for Gen Z specifically, only 43% of frontline workers know what support is even available to them, against 73% of their desk-based peers. That's not a workforce that doesn't need help. It's a workforce whose employer never told them what was on offer, in a format they'd actually see.

The fix isn't a bigger benefits package, it's a smaller communication problem hiding inside a bigger one. When frontline staff do engage with a wellbeing programme, the same research found they see 42% greater improvement in resilience than desk-based staff who engage with the same one. The support works. Most of the workforce it's aimed at has simply never heard it exists.

Training a Mental Health First Aider is the easy 80% of the job. A UK study following MHFAiders three months after training found genuinely strong outcomes: 86% said the role made their own job more meaningful, 89% found the conversations rewarding, 96% said they'd actually used what they learned. But every one of those numbers held only inside organisations that kept supporting the first aiders after the certificate, through what researchers call a managed network, overseen by a workplace mental health specialist. Left alone after training, first aiders reported far weaker results.

That's the part most rollouts skip. A training day is a single event with a clear end point, easy to budget, easy to schedule, easy to tick off. Ongoing supervision, a point of contact for the first aiders themselves, regular check-ins, a manager culture that actually backs the role, is a standing commitment with no obvious finish line, so it's the part that gets quietly dropped.

If you've trained mental health first aiders and haven't asked any of them in the last three months whether they've actually used the training, or who supports them when a conversation goes somewhere heavy, you don't have a mental health programme. You have a list of people who once attended a course.

Workers in process, plant and machine operative roles had the highest sickness absence rate of any occupational group in Britain last year, 3.3%, more than three times the 1.0% rate among managers and directors, according to the ONS. Mental ill health is now the single biggest driver of long-term absence across the board, cited in 41% of cases lasting four weeks or more, per CIPD's 2025 survey, the worst figure in fifteen years. Average annual absence per employee has climbed from 5.8 days before the pandemic to 9.4 days now.

Most boards still hear the case for frontline mental health support as a values argument: the right thing to do for people doing hard, physical, often invisible work. It's also sitting directly inside the absence line of the P&L, in the group of employees least likely to have a desk-based manager checking in daily and least likely to be offered support in a format that reaches them.

If your highest-absence occupational group and your least-engaged wellbeing programme are the same group of people, that's not two separate problems. It's one problem, showing up on two different spreadsheets that probably don't talk to each other.

Sally Jameson is Head of People at L3 Group, a multi-site business spanning fibre network infrastructure, business services and more, with teams working out of sites in Seaham, Oldham, Manchester and Duns, work that's physical, site-based, and rarely behind a desk.

Since then, she's pushed back publicly on the idea that mental health support starts and ends with time off, arguing it needs to reach people on the ground, not just live in a policy document, built one people strategy for a workforce spread across four towns that rarely see each other, where a single, uniform approach to support was never going to work, and made the case that Mental Health First Aid training only matters once it becomes daily practice, not a certificate that sits unused.

In this week's Leader Spotlight, we look ahead to sitting down with Sally to unpack why the duvet-day default stops working, what real support looks like across a physically demanding, multi-site team, and what it actually costs a business to get this right. A note on what follows: Tuesday's conversation hasn't happened yet as this issue goes out, and a search for more of Sally's own public material didn't turn up much beyond the line above, so instead of five direct quotes, here are five threads from her own guest pack worth bookmarking ahead of it.

It's the cheapest intervention to build and the easiest one to switch off from once someone's back at their desk, or their site. Worth watching for what Sally says actually needs to replace it.

Office wellbeing programmes, apps, posters, drop-in sessions, are all built around someone with a desk and a lunch hour. Worth watching for what she says has to change when neither of those things exist.

This is the exact gap this issue's second Micro-Playbook gets into: trained first aiders who are never actually used. Worth watching for how Sally's kept hers active.

Seaham, Oldham, Manchester, Duns, four different towns, four different site cultures, one HR function. Worth watching for how much of the strategy she keeps consistent versus lets flex locally.

The case for investing properly in this still stalls at board level more often than it should. Worth watching for how Sally makes it land with people who control the budget.

Thank you in advance, Sally, see you Tuesday!

And that's a wrap for Issue 011. Something land? Hit reply and tell us which section you're taking back to your team.

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