For years we have tended to frame workplace mental health as an individual issue. Employees are encouraged to be more resilient, download mindfulness apps, attend counselling sessions, or learn how to better manage stress. Yet despite growing investment in wellness programmes, burnout, stress‑related absenteeism and mental health‑related disability claims continue to rise. At some point organisations have to ask a more uncomfortable question: what if the workplace itself is part of the problem? Last year’s Sanlam’s Benchmark Survey found 39% of employers reported increased absenteeism linked to stress, anxiety and other mental health challenges. That finding reflects something many leaders and employees already sense intuitively — people are not struggling because life has become more demanding, but because work itself has, in many cases, become harder to sustain emotionally and psychologically.In South Africa especially, employees seldom arrive at work carrying only the pressures of their jobs. Financial strain, long commutes, inequality, community safety concerns and uneven access to healthcare place many people under huge stress before the working day begins. When workplaces add excessive workloads, constant pressure, poor management, unclear expectations or toxic cultures into the mix, the cumulative effect becomes difficult to ignore.This is why mental health can no longer sit only within HR or employee wellness programmes. It needs to be recognised as a workplace design, leadership and governance issue. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates depression and anxiety contribute to 12-billion lost working days globally every year, costing the economy about $1-trillion. Behind those numbers are very human realities: people quietly disengaging, managers stretched beyond capacity, and employees trying to cope in environments where rest is mistaken for weakness and constant availability has become normalised.The WHO and International Labour Organisation’s Prevent–Protect–Support framework offers a useful shift in thinking because it moves the conversation upstream:Prevent. Address psychosocial risks before they become crises. That means looking honestly at workloads, management practices, role clarity, autonomy, bullying and workplace culture. Prevention requires redesigning jobs for clarity and fairness, embedding respect into workplace culture, and using data such as absence and claims trends to identify hotspots.Protect. Strengthen the positive aspects of work itself. Managers matter enormously. Employees thrive in environments where leaders communicate clearly, build trust, recognise effort, encourage healthy boundaries and create psychological safety. These “soft skills” have very hard organisational consequences.Support. Ensure employees can recover and return to work sustainably. Flexible work arrangements, phased return‑to‑work programmes, reasonable accommodations and earlier interventions all help employees rebuild confidence. Support works best when it exists within a healthy system, not as a patch for a damaging one.Employers and insurers also need to work more closely together. Better use of absence, claims and behavioural data can help identify pressure points earlier, while stronger return‑to‑work pathways can improve outcomes for employees and organisations. We highlight five priorities for collaboration: elevate psychosocial risks to a formal risk register; implement an integrated mental health strategy; invest in managerial competence; collaborate on data‑led interventions; and optimise early intervention and return‑to‑work pathways.Ultimately, healthier workplaces are not only about wellbeing. They are tied to productivity, retention, sustainability and organisational resilience itself. The organisations that stand out in the coming years will not simply be the ones with the best wellness benefits, but the ones willing to look more deeply at how work is experienced every day, and whether their workplaces genuinely allow people to thrive.• Andrews is senior medical adviser at Sanlam Corporate: Group Risk.