Employers take action!
Before it becomes a crisis
Our public system pays for crisis, not prevention. Workplaces have both the reason and the means to change that.
Delay accelerates harm
In New Zealand, if your mind is in trouble, the system usually meets you at your worst. You wait. A GP referral, then more waiting. What was manageable in March becomes, by September, the thing that stops you working and sleeping.
There is a reason, and it is not a lack of good intentions.
So if early support is to be funded somewhere, who has a reason to pay for it? One answer sits in plain sight.Employers already help fund it, for two reasons.
The power of organisational development
- The first is minimising harm. A decent employer does not want the work making people unwell, and increasingly the law agrees. The heavy load, the unclear roles, the constant restructure, the manager promoted for being good at the job and never taught to lead. Those are not weaknesses in the staff. They are features of how the work is built, and can be changed. That is the floor, and plenty of workplaces are trying to reach it.
- The second is more interesting. Good employers want their people at their best. Not just unharmed, but competent, connected and doing work they can be proud of. A higher ambition than compliance, and where the real return sits.
Workplace wellbeing, a real reason to act early
This is the floor and the ceiling of workplace wellbeing. Together they give a workplace real reason to act early, before the wait-list and the crisis. Not every employer can afford to, and not every one will. But the motivation is real, and the better workplaces already act on it.
This is not a wholly comfortable position. Ideally public services would meet this need, equitably, so the help you get would not depend on who you work for. That is not the world we have, and people go without while we wait.
So what should they fund? The usual answer is an Employee Assistance Programme, and an EAP meets part of the need: someone to talk to, in confidence, when things are hard. Worth having.
An EAP does nothing about the harm the work is creating.
But hold it against those two reasons that should motivate employers to fund this work and the gaps show. An EAP does nothing about the harm the work is creating. It helps a person cope, and leaves the load, the unclear role and the untrained manager where they were. And for someone who needs real support to get back to their best, a few counselling sessions is often not enough. It waits for people to call, then works inside conditions no one has changed. It is part of the answer, not the whole of it, closer to the ambulance than the fence.
The law has started to help.
The Health and Safety at Work Act covers psychological harm, WorkSafe issued guidance on psychosocial risks in 2025, and ISO 45003 gives employers a framework. Real progress on the harm side, the floor. But if we stop there, and reduce wellbeing to risk and compliance, another box to tick, we fund the floor and forget the ceiling. People do not do their best work because nothing is hurting them. They do it when they feel competent, connected and supported.
So what does it look like done properly?
Our workplaces - the big lever
If we are serious about mental health, we cannot keep pouring all the resource into the deep end and calling it a strategy. Te Whare Tapa Whā has told us for decades that hauora is a whole system, not a single fix. The workplace is one of the biggest levers we have.
The work now is helping organisations get this right. Take the harm out of the job, get good support to people early, and two things follow. Less pressure on a public system already stretched thin. And people supported to be at their best, at work and at home.
Sean Versteegh is a registered clinical psychologist and co-CEO of 3 Big Things, a specialist New Zealand workplace psychology firm.
