What the ‘Keep Britain Working’ report means for employers and what needs to change
As many of us know, the UK is facing a growing mental health and long-term sickness problem. More people are taking time away from work because of health issues, and increasing numbers are staying out of work for longer periods.
On 5 November, Sir Charlie Mayfield published the Keep Britain Working report after a year-long review of the issue. Much of the information is familiar, but the report highlights just how seriously the government is now treating the rise in long-term sickness and its impact on the labour market.
The numbers tell a clear story:
9 million working-age adults are now economically inactive.
Around a third are out of work because of long-term sickness.
Employers are losing around £85 billion each year in lost output.
A further £47 billion is being absorbed by the NHS and the welfare system.
Behind these figures are people who are struggling, teams that are burned out and managers feel unsure how to support their staff. Ultimately, we have systems that are inconsistent and difficult to navigate.
The report captures the issue directly: our society is getting older and living longer, but becoming unwell earlier in life.
Although the scale of the challenge is significant, there is also a real opportunity to rethink how we support people at work. One of the most encouraging elements of the review is its call to re-humanise the workplace using a more person-centred approach, and to build stronger partnerships between employers, employees, providers and government. These are ideas I have been advocating for some time.
The report outlines three areas of focus for the coming years.
The first is the culture of fear that still surrounds mental health. Many people hold back from asking for help because they worry about stigma or the impact on their career. Managers can also feel uncertain about how to handle sensitive conversations.
The second is the lack of a clear and consistent support system. Wellbeing offers often appear as a patchwork of separate initiatives, which makes it difficult for people to understand what is available and how to use it.
The third relates to structural barriers faced by disabled people, which can make it harder to start or stay in work.
These issues are complex, but they can be addressed if we are prepared to redesign the way support works, rather than continuing to add isolated tools on top of existing systems.
It is also important to recognise that mental health is deeply personal. As the British Psychological Society reminds us, support should treat people as individuals rather than statistics. At the same time, many of the causes of poor mental health stem from the workplace itself. Prevention requires new rhythms of work that create space for recovery, connection and trust.
Over the past three years, Nula has been exploring the future of work through the lens of both people and planet. Our work brings together performance and wellbeing, using nature-based practices to reduce stress, strengthen relationships and make recovery a shared responsibility rather than an individual task.
Much of this work has been informed by the success of Green Social Prescribing, where people are referred by GPs into nature-based activities to support anxiety and low mood. The results have been consistently positive. After taking part in nature-based programmes, average happiness scores increased from 5.3 to 7.5 out of 10. Life satisfaction rose from 4.7 to 6.8. Average anxiety scores reduced from 4.8 to 3.4. Social prescribing programmes also demonstrate strong economic value, with returns of between £2.14 and £8.56 for every pound invested.
These outcomes are not the result of nature alone. They work because they are relational, accessible and built around the individual’s needs.
Below are three areas we are currently helping organisations develop.
Establishing healthier workplace rhythms
Workload alone doesn’t cause burnout. The real strain comes from weeks that leave no room to recover, reset or connect with others. Over time, teams lose energy, creativity and connection and people find it harder to stay well at work. When recovery is optional, most people skip it. When collaboration only happens in meetings, ideas become flatter and teams do too. Over time, these patterns show up as exhaustion, friction and stress-related absence.
To tackle this, we look at the full employee experience, from onboarding to exit, and redesign it with rhythm-aware and nature-aware touchpoints. This can include short protected periods of Green Time each day, outdoor 1:1s, walking meetings, community time in the year, and clearer rhythms for focus, deep work and rest.
The aim is to make healthier patterns part of how work actually happens, not something individuals must squeeze in around their workload. When these rhythms become visible and shared across a team, stress is less likely to escalate into burnout or long-term sickness, and performance becomes more sustainable.
Improving Workplace Health Provision
Support systems are most effective when they are co-designed with the people who use them. Our Workplace Health Provision work begins with a 12 to 16 week discovery and co-design phase that involves interviews, workshops and cultural analysis to understand what is actually happening inside an organisation. We identify real barriers, uncover existing strengths and build a prototype pathway shaped by the employees and managers who will use it.
A large study involving 46,000 UK workers found no clear evidence that isolated individual tools, such as apps or single training sessions, improve workplace wellbeing. We still need to support individuals, but not in isolation. This pilot is individual-facing, but it is designed and embedded as part of the wider workplace pathway and employee experience rather than offered as a stand-alone fix.
The output of this phase is a tailored, evidence-informed pathway ready for pilot testing, along with support in engaging stakeholders and aligning leadership around next steps.
Building the evidence leaders need
Prevention only works when it is measurable. We work with organisations to create an outcomes framework that tracks the indicators that matter most, such as wellbeing, participation in work, psychological safety, access to support, equity and economic impact. This ensures that evidence is gathered from the beginning rather than retrofitted later.
If you’d like to explore how these ideas translate into practical action for your organisation, join me for our upcoming webinar. We’ll walk through the latest insights from the Keep Britain Working review, what employers are being asked to think about next, and how nature-first, co-designed approaches can help people stay well and stay in work.