Reasonable Adjustments for Mental Health at Work
Mental health is now one of the leading causes of long-term sickness absence in the UK. Yet in most organisations, adjustments for mental health are still handled through awkward one-off conversations, if they happen at all.
The Equality Act 2010 doesn’t just cover physical conditions. A mental health condition (such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, bipolar disorder, or OCD) counts as a disability where it has a substantial, long-term effect on someone’s day-to-day life. When it does, the duty to make reasonable adjustments applies in full.
Why mental health adjustments go wrong
- Employees fear disclosure will mark them as unreliable, so they say nothing until crisis point.
- Managers worry about saying the wrong thing, so conversations get avoided or handled inconsistently.
- Agreements made in good faith are never written down, so they evaporate when a manager changes.
What good adjustments look like
Mental health adjustments are usually small and inexpensive: flexible start times after poor sleep, regular structured check-ins instead of ad-hoc ones, a quiet space to decompress, adjusted deadlines during treatment, agreed cover for appointments, or a plan for what happens on difficult days.
The hard part isn’t the adjustment. It’s having a process that makes the conversation safe, keeps the agreement alive, and doesn’t depend on one manager’s memory.
How TryMosaic helps
TryMosaic gives employees a structured, private way to raise what they need, without rehearsing a difficult speech. Managers get a guided workflow for agreeing what’s reasonable, and agreed adjustments live in a Workplace Passport the employee controls, so nothing is lost when teams change.
HR sees anonymised trends (where requests are rising, what’s being agreed, where support is falling short) without ever seeing individual disclosures they don’t need to see.