Mental health and performance: ending the false dichotomy

In France, burnout affects between 2 and 3 million employees every year. The overall cost of poor wellbeing at work, absenteeism, presenteeism, turnover, productivity loss, is estimated at €13,500 per year per disengaged employee. This is what the IBET (Indice de Bien-Être au Travail) measures, a management tool developed to objectify what was until recently considered a matter of feeling.

For the organisation, this figure is not abstract. It translates into delayed projects, degraded quality, unhappy customers and departing talent. The mental health of teams is not a question of comfort, it is a question of competitiveness.

Understanding psychosocial risks

Psychosocial risks (PSR) encompass the organisational and relational factors likely to affect the physical and mental health of workers. The reference model, the Karasek model, identifies three cumulative dimensions.

Psychological demand: the quantity and complexity of tasks to be accomplished. Control: the autonomy available to the employee to organise their work. And social support: the quality of support provided by the manager and colleagues.

Maximum risk occurs in the combination known as 'job strain': high demand, low control, low support. This is the most toxic configuration, and unfortunately the most prevalent during transformation periods.

« Suffering at work is not inevitable. It is the symptom of an organisation that has not yet learned to transform itself without sacrificing its members. »

— Christophe Dejours, Souffrance en France (1998)

The three levels of prevention

Prevention in mental health at work is classically organised at three levels.

Primary prevention tackles causes: work organisation, clarity of roles, workload, management style. This is the most effective and least practised level, because it requires touching the very structure of work, not just its symptoms.

Secondary prevention strengthens individuals against existing stress factors: stress management training, support groups, development of managers' emotional competencies. Useful, but it does not resolve structural problems.

Tertiary prevention takes care of already-affected individuals: psychological support, post-burnout return support, occupational health. Necessary but very costly, and reveals a failure of the first two levels.

Examples that set the standard

Several French companies have demonstrated that structured investment in mental health generates measurable returns.

Schneider Electric deployed a global wellbeing programme centred on four pillars: body, mind, social relationships and life purpose. Result: a significant reduction in absenteeism and an improvement in engagement measured by IBET.

Danone integrated mental health into its global performance model, training all its managers in early detection of distress signals and active listening posture. The programme rests on the principle that the immediate manager is the first link in prevention, and must be trained and supported accordingly.

These approaches share a common point: they treat mental health as a strategic subject, managed by performance indicators, with a sponsor at the executive committee level.

« Taking care of your people is not philanthropy. It is long-term performance management. »

— Frank Magdelyns, CHRO Schneider Electric France

The decisive role of the front-line manager

All studies converge: the direct manager is the most determining factor for mental health at work, for better or worse. It is not global HR policy that makes the daily difference, but the quality of the relationship between an employee and their line manager.

A manager who listens, recognises, protects their team from contradictory injunctions and creates space to discuss difficulties before they become crises, this manager is worth more for the health of their teams than any wellbeing programme.

This places manager training at the heart of prevention strategy. Not stress management training, but training in managerial posture: how to create a space of trust, how to detect weak signals, how to have a difficult conversation without making the situation worse.