Whether and how companies support the mental health of their employees should be firmly on investors’ agenda. It is both economically material and ethically important.
The UK government’s Mayfield Report cites a cost to the UK economy of £85 billion a year, while Deloitte estimates a direct cost to employers of £51 billion. We agree with the 87 percent of UK employers who acknowledge they have a responsibility to help their employees remain mentally healthy.
When we first looked at the issue in 2019, we recognised its importance – but we also found that the market lacked a structured means of assessing companies’ performance in supporting their employees’ mental health.
In response, CCLA created the Corporate Mental Health Benchmark. The first edition, which we published in 2022, assessed 100 UK-listed companies chosen by market capitalisation and workforce size. Later that year, we followed it with a global equivalent.
The benchmark scores each company across four themes: management commitment and policy; governance and management; leadership and innovation; and performance reporting and impact.
The assessment, which is based on companies’ public disclosures, includes 27 questions, worth up to 217 points, and places companies in five performance tiers.
An objective assessment
The benchmark provides an objective assessment of how well companies are addressing issues around the mental health of their employees, enabling them to demonstrate progress – or backsliding – over time and offering comparison with peers. Crucially, it provides an invaluable tool for stewardship and engagement.
It is always difficult for investors to claim a causal link between their advocacy and engagement on a particular issue and improved corporate performance. But, after five years, we believe that we can make the case that a combination of careful benchmark design and persistent engagement has delivered tangible outcomes.
We believe that the benchmark has proved an effective tool for a number of reasons.
First, the clarity of the questions and the transparency of the benchmark’s methodology provide companies with a clear roadmap to guide improvement.
As the most improved constituent of the UK index, engineering firm Weir Group, told us: “The CCLA Corporate Mental Health Benchmark has been invaluable to Weir. The detailed criteria and question-by-question feedback reports allow us to easily track progress, and identify our strengths and areas of opportunity so we can drive change and make an impact as we work towards our ultimate goal of achieving zero harm.”
Second, inclusion in the benchmark taps into companies’ competitive instincts – particularly within sectors, company boards are highly sensitive to relative performance.
Third, comparability is a powerful tool for investors to understand corporate performance and engage with laggards.
Collaborative engagement for mental health
To that end, the benchmark has underpinned an investor campaign since 2022, currently backed by 55 investors managing a combined $9.5 trillion of assets, which calls for companies to protect and promote good workplace mental health, both for commercial reasons and as part of their duty of care to their employees.
Companies have proven increasingly open to this engagement. The number of companies prepared to engage with members of the investor coalition on the benchmark has risen from 73 out of 200 in 2022, to 136 out of 220 in 2025.
So, what has it achieved? There are plenty of anecdotes from our interactions from companies where the benchmark has encouraged them to consider how they are supporting their employees’ mental health – and has helped them improve.
One company told us that the benchmark has changed the way people think, feel and speak about mental health in the workplace. Another said that having increased its focus on mental health, its internal wellbeing scores have gone up by double digits three years running.
A third told us that the benchmark’s focus on public disclosures has raised the profile of its mental health work with the board.
Evidence of impact
But as well as anecdote, there is data. This month, we have published analysis of five years of the performance of companies in the UK 100 benchmark.
Since its first edition in 2022, there has been marked, system-wide improvement in the metrics tracked by the benchmark.
Overall, the average UK benchmark score has risen from 35 percent in 2022 to 47 percent in 2026. The proportion of companies in the top two performance tiers has risen from just 10 in 2022 to 26 this year – this strong performance is to the direct benefit of more than 1 million people employed by these companies.
Again, we can’t prove causation. Perhaps companies would have improved without encouragement from CCLA and other investors in the coalition. But our discussions with companies and their engagement with the questions and metrics within the benchmark strongly suggest to us that the benchmark is, at least, an important tool to enable improved performance.
Progress notwithstanding, there is still much work to be done. Some companies continue to lag. Fifteen remain in the lowest performance tier. We continue to hope that the transparency created by the benchmark, and the associated reputational impact, will encourage laggards to work harder on employee mental health.
More widely, gaps remain. For example, barely half of companies in the UK benchmark report on training provided to line managers, and few say they use data to manage the impact and drive improvement of the measures they are taking. Indeed, the average score, at below 50 percent, remains far too low.
Investors have an important to role to play in encouraging companies to follow the recommendations in our report to demonstrate leadership commitment, set a policy and measurable objectives, promote good work practices supported through training and to come together with peers to share good practice.
Meanwhile, we encourage investors to join the global investor coalition. Taking action on this issue not only supports long-term corporate profitability but also offers the potential to improve the lives of millions of employees.
Amy Browne is director of stewardship at CCLA.
