Insights

Explore the latest trends and risks of mental health in the workplace in 2026. Learn employer responsibilities and strategies for supporting mental health in your team.

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‍43.8% of UK workers are living with joint or muscle pain, and three quarters of them have been for more than two years. The cost is leaking out through sickness absence and presenteeism, not through self-reported performance, which is where most organisations are looking.

‍Around 15% of the UK workforce is neurodivergent, and in some industries it is closer to a quarter. Designing the workplace around neurotypical defaults is no longer a defensible position, and the people best placed to change that are leaders.

‍Belonging has lived in the culture column for a decade. The data is now too clear to keep it there. When belonging falls, the rest of workforce health tends to fall with it, and the people best placed to influence that are leaders.

Not all employee wellbeing platforms do the same job. Some are mental health apps, some are fitness or perks marketplaces, some are content platforms, and a few are preventative health platforms that measure risk across a whole workforce and act before it becomes absence. Champion Health is in that last group. Here is how the leading UK options compare, and how to choose.

Most of us will have reacted with some surprise to the news that healthy life expectancy has fallen in both the UK and the US. The UK now ranks 20th out of 21 comparable wealthy nations, with only the US ranking lower. That should give every employer pause.

Mental health strain almost never announces itself. It builds quietly, in the cancelled plans, the shorter fuse, the colleague who has stopped contributing in meetings, the energy that takes a little more effort to summon each morning. By the time someone is signed off, in crisis, or finally asking for help, those signals have usually been there for weeks or months, and sometimes much longer than that.

Nearly half of people we've assessed (47%) have experienced high or very high stress in the past two weeks. If that's how you've been feeling lately, you're not alone. What our data also tells us is that while stress is relatively easy to recognise, knowing how to manage it is much harder. The fact that you're reading this matters. You're not ignoring it. You're looking for a way to handle it better, whether that's for yourself or for the people in your organisation. So let's dig into what's really going on.