Health wellness

New Guidelines Published for Workplace Mental Health Best Practices

New Guidelines Published for Workplace Mental Health Best Practices, Targeting $47.6 Billion Annual Productivity Drain

Baltimore, Md. – Nov. 26, 2025 Employers now have a research-backed roadmap to curb escalating workplace mental-health costs with today’s release of “Best-Practice Guidelines for Workforce Mental Health & Well-Being” from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The 42-page document distills 18 months of peer-reviewed studies and employer pilot programs into seven actionable standards expected to influence 2026 benefit contracts and insurance ratings.

The guidelines arrive as 83 percent of U.S. employees report that work-related stress impairs their personal relationships and 55 percent say they are “very likely” to switch employers for better mental-health support, according to 2025 data from Mental Health America. Depression alone is estimated to cost U.S. employers $47.6 billion annually in lost productivity, a 21 percent increase since 2022.

“Mental health is no longer a side initiative—it is a measurable safety and performance metric,” said Dr. Ron Goetzel, senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Health and Productivity Studies and lead author of the report. “Companies that adopt the new standards cut turnover 14 percent and sick leave 11 percent within the first year.”

The framework organizes interventions into three domains—psychosocial, organizational and environmental—mirroring the widely adopted Total Worker Health model from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Mandatory components include parity audits of health plans, manager training on trauma-informed supervision, and climate surveys tied to executive bonuses. Optional “innovation credits” reward employers for digital therapeutics, 24-hour crisis chat staffed by certified peers, and flexible scheduling codified in union agreements.

Early adopters are already seeing returns. At Metro Nashville Public Schools, absences among teachers fell 9 percent after the district added no-cost counseling visits and limited after-hours email, moves that earned the system a 2025 Carolyn C. Mattingly Award for Mental Health in the Workplace.

Similarly, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP lowered attrition among first-year associates from 22 percent to 9 percent by integrating mental-health checkpoints into performance reviews and granting 10 “wellness days” usable without advance notice.

Small and mid-size employers receive tailored guidance, such as pooled purchasing cooperatives for employee assistance programs (EAP) and step-by-step scripts for discussing accommodations. The authors also advise insurers to embed mental-health quality measures—provider wait times, cultural-competency scores, out-of-network reimbursement rates—into annual employer reporting dashboards, a recommendation echoed in June 2025 by the California Mental Health Services Oversight & Accountability Commission .

Implementation checklists, ROI calculators and policy templates are available free of charge at the newly launched WorkplaceMentalHealth.jhu.edu portal. The research team will host a national webinar on Dec. 10, 2025, for benefits consultants, occupational nurses and human-resource executives seeking certification as “Workplace Mental Health Advisors.”

About Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

The school is the largest institution of its kind worldwide, enrolling 2,300 graduate students and administering $600 million in public-health research annually. Its Total Worker Health Center is one of ten NIOSH-funded centers of excellence focused on translating science into healthier, safer and more productive workplaces.