The Workplaces Where People Can Actually Be Human
There is a question that does not show up on most employee surveys, but that determines almost everything about whether people stay, perform, and bring their real selves to work.
The question is not whether they feel satisfied. It is not whether they would recommend the company to a friend. It is something harder to name and easier to feel: do they believe they are allowed to struggle here?
Not perform. Not manage the optics of a difficult quarter. Actually struggle, and be a full person, without it costing them.
The answer to that question, it turns out, is one of the most reliable predictors of whether a workplace earns the loyalty, the effort, and the tenure of the people in it.
What Mental Health Month Gets Wrong in Most Workplace Conversations
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and most organizations will mark it the same way. An email from HR. A reminder about the Employee Assistance Program. A webinar on resilience. A well-intentioned message from leadership about the importance of self-care.
What most of those efforts have in common is that they treat mental health as something employees manage on their own time, in their own lives, with resources the company provides as a benefit. The subtext, even when unintended, is: handle this privately, and come back ready to perform.
The organizations that score highest on the Most Loved Workplace® Love of Workplace Index have figured out something different. Mental health is not a benefit they offer. It is a condition they create. The difference is not semantic. It shows up in attrition data, in survey response rates, in how managers talk to their teams, in whether a person who is having a hard month tells their manager or hides it.
Psychological Safety Is Not a Program. It Is a Daily Signal.
Psychological safety is one of the most-researched concepts in organizational behavior. It’s the belief that you can speak up, ask for help, make a mistake, or acknowledge that you are not okay without it being held against you. Google’s Project Aristotle, one of the most extensive studies of team performance ever conducted, found that it was the single most important factor in predicting whether a team succeeded.
And yet the gap between organizations that have it and organizations that think they have it is significant. According to McKinsey, 89 percent of employees say psychological safety is essential — yet only 26 percent of leaders consistently demonstrate the behaviors that create it. That gap does not distribute evenly across levels. The people closest to the work, individual contributors and frontline employees, consistently report feeling less safe than the leaders who believe they have built a safe culture.
That last data point is the one worth sitting with. A company’s senior leadership team may genuinely believe that their culture is psychologically safe. The person assembling orders in a warehouse, answering phones in a call center, or managing a caseload in a healthcare system may be living a completely different reality.
The workplaces that close that gap do not do it with a policy. They do it by building structures that make safety a daily, visible experience rather than a cultural aspiration.
What a Healthy Workplace Actually Looks Like
The companies on the Most Loved Workplace® Mental Health designation list published this May share specific practices that make psychological safety real rather than aspirational.
Managers are expected to check in, not just on deliverables but on people. Feedback loops are designed so that employees believe their input leads to change, not just to documentation. Mental health days are offered without requiring a medical explanation. Employees who take time off for mental health reasons do not return to a culture that treats absence as evidence of weakness.
Parkview Health, a Most Loved Workplace® certified organization in the healthcare sector, offers dedicated mental health care teams, 24/7 crisis support, and in-house therapy resources for staff, and consistently attributes a nursing retention rate above 90 percent to meeting employees where they are as whole people. Healthcare is one of the most psychologically demanding sectors in the workforce. The fact that Parkview sustains that retention rate is not accidental. It’s the direct result of treating employee mental health as an operational priority, not a wellness perk.
Kyndryl, another certified organization, built what it calls a unified wellbeing framework addressing physical, mental, social, and financial wellbeing through coordinated programs and benefits. The integration matters. Mental health that is siloed from financial stress, from workload, from flexibility, from manager relationships, is mental health support in name only.
Neurodivergent Employees Are Among the Beneficiaries
Employees with ADHD, autism, anxiety, dyslexia, and related profiles experience psychological safety gaps at significantly higher rates than their neurotypical colleagues. They are also among the most underemployed, underretained, and underrecognized segments of the workforce. The organizations that have figured out how to create genuinely psychologically safe environments tend to find, without necessarily targeting it, that they also become workplaces where neurodivergent employees can do their real work without spending energy managing how they appear.
That is not a coincidence. Psychological safety is not a specialized program for a specific population. It is a condition that, when genuinely present, makes the workplace more human for everyone.
The Question Worth Asking This Month
If the people on your team who are struggling right now knew it would be okay to say so, would they?
If the honest answer is uncertain, that is the most useful data you have this Mental Health Awareness Month. Not as a cause for alarm, but as a starting point.
The Most Loved Workplace® assessment measures psychological safety as a direct component of the Love of Workplace Index. Not as a soft metric, but as a scored dimension tied to retention, attrition, and performance outcomes. If you’re not sure where your organization stands, the CertCheck is a two-minute starting point.
Start with a free CertCheck at certcheck.mostlovedworkplace.com — a two-minute eligibility check that shows you where your culture signal stands right now. No commitment, no sales call. Just your number.
Louis Carter is the founder and CEO of Best Practice Institute, Most Loved Workplace, and Results-Based Culture. Author of In Great Company, Change Champions Field Guide, and Best Practices in Talent Management, as well as a series of Leadership Development books. He is a trusted strategic advisor and coach to CEOs, CHROs, and leaders of mid-sized to F500 companies – enabling change and steering employer brand development together with highly effective teams, leaders, and organizations as a whole.
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