Today the City Mental Health Alliance (CMHA) has released the 2021 Thriving at Work Assessment reports to participating employers. The CMHA’s Thriving at Work assessment measures an organisation’s approach to workplace mental health. Participating employers demonstrate their work against 10 Standards which are based on the evidence-based criteria set out in CMHA’s Thriving at Work Guide .

Organisations have today received their scores and been accredited as: Committed, Achieving, Excelling or Health Creating. These results enable them to understand what’s going well and areas for improvement, as well as being able to benchmark how they’ve performed against other organisations.

In the 2021 Assessment, organisations were for the first time measured on their approach to supporting employee mental health across the whole employee lifecycle (from early careers to retirement), their actions to influence best practice across the business ecosystem, for example through supplier engagement, and efforts to understand and address the needs of diverse groups.

Alison Unsted, Director, Strategy & Operations, of the City Mental Health Alliance says:

“Despite the wellbeing challenges faced by organisations over the past 12 months, it has been really encouraging to see the continued progress being made. For example, we have seen a significant increase in the number of organisations providing mental health training for line managers and key personnel (e.g. HR) up from 56% at the start of 2020 to 95% in 2021. Alongside this, formal accountability measures for leaders increased from 28% to 45% indicating that mental health and wellbeing is being prioritised as a business-critical issue”.

Poppy Jaman, CEO of the City Mental Health Alliance says:

“This year the CMHA updated its assessment with an ambitious set of actions for employers to innovate and lead the way in creating mentally healthy workplaces. As we continue to respond to the pandemic, I have been proud to see how some of the most prominent brands in our country recognise their responsibility to protect and support the mental health of their employees and increasingly their wider networks in society.

“I am proud of all the organisations that taken steps to understand what further progress can be made to create positive mental health for their workforce. By assessing where organisations are individually and collectively, we are able to keep pushing the boundaries on workplace mental health to positively impact society; supporting the people around us to stay well and ultimately to help to save lives.”