There's a version of this scene playing out in offices across the country right now. Someone's been a bit quieter than usual. Their replies to emails have got shorter. They're taking longer lunches, or none at all. Nobody says anything, because nobody's quite sure what to say, or whether it's their place to say it. So the meeting goes ahead. The deadline gets mentioned. Everyone carries on as normal.
Except it isn't normal. It's just quiet.
We've written before about why these conversations stay difficult even in workplaces that genuinely want to get this right: the awkwardness, the fear of saying the wrong thing, the sense that mental health still sits slightly outside the usual run of workplace conversation. This week, we want to look at the other side of that coin: what the silence itself actually costs, once it's allowed to settle in.
The Cost to the Person Who's Struggling
When someone doesn't feel able to name what's going on for them, they don't stop struggling; they just stop showing it. Presenteeism, showing up physically while mentally checked out, becomes the default. Concentration slips. Small mistakes creep in. The work that used to take an hour now takes three, and the person doing it is too exhausted, or too frightened of being found out, to explain why.
Left long enough, this pattern tends to deepen rather than resolve on its own. What could have been a conversation and a few reasonable adjustments early on becomes, months later, a period of long-term absence or a resignation that catches everyone off guard. HR teams often describe these departures as sudden. They rarely are. The signs were usually there, just never voiced. (team, 2025)
The Cost to the Team Around Them
Silence doesn't stay contained to one desk. When a colleague is struggling, and nobody addresses it, the work they can't manage tends to land, quietly and without much discussion, on whoever's nearby. Teammates pick up the slack without being asked, partly out of loyalty and partly because naming the problem feels like betraying someone's privacy.
Over time, this creates its own kind of resentment, not towards the person who's struggling, but towards a culture that seems to expect people to absorb these gaps without support. And there's a second-order effect that's easy to miss: the rest of the team is watching. How an organisation handles one person's silent struggle sends a clear signal about what will happen if they ever find themselves in the same position. Get it wrong, and you're not just failing one employee. You're teaching everyone else to keep quiet, too. (Harwood, 2026)
The Cost in Numbers
It's tempting to treat all of this as a "soft" issue, difficult to pin down and harder still to put a figure on. The data says otherwise. According to the Health and Safety Executive's latest figures, 964,000 UK workers reported suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25, accounting for 22.1 million lost working days – an average of nearly 23 days per case. Deloitte's research estimates the annual cost of poor mental health to UK employers at between £53 and £56 billion, working out at roughly £1,500–£1,700 per employee per year across the entire workforce, not just those who are struggling.
What makes silence particularly expensive is timing. The same Deloitte research found that organisations investing in the right mental health support see an average return of £5 for every £1 spent. However, that return depends on catching issues early, while they are still manageable, rather than after they have escalated into absence, turnover, or crisis. Silence is what stands between an organisation and that early intervention.
The Cost No One Talks About: Silence From Both Directions
Here's the part that often gets missed. It isn't only employees who stay quiet. Research from Benenden Health suggests that while most employers believe they can recognise the signs of poor mental health in their teams, more than half admit they have held back from approaching a struggling employee, worried about getting it wrong or making things worse. Other studies suggest that only around 13–14% of employees feel genuinely comfortable discussing their mental health at work.
So you end up with two people, both aware something isn't right, both saying nothing, one out of fear of being judged, the other out of fear of causing offence. Neither silence is malicious. Both are costly.
Duty of Care Isn't Optional
There's also a compliance dimension worth naming plainly. Employers have a legal duty of care around work-related stress, and theHSE's Management Standards exist precisely because organisations are expected to manage psychosocial risk with the same seriousness as physical safety. A workplace culture where concerns go consistently unspoken and unaddressed isn't just a wellbeing gap; it's a risk gap, and one that becomes harder to defend the longer it's left unexamined.
Breaking the Pattern
None of this means every team needs to become a group therapy session. It means building the conditions in which a slightly awkward conversation can happen before it becomes a crisis, training managers to notice and respond to early signs with confidence rather than avoidance, and building enough trust into day-to-day working life that people don't feel they're taking a career risk by admitting they're not okay.
The teams that get this right aren't the ones with the loudest wellbeing policies. They're the ones where a quiet colleague gets checked in on before their absence becomes long-term, and where a manager who's unsure what to say has actually been shown how to start.
Ready to Break the Silence in Your Organisation?
At Mental Health in Business, we help organisations move past good intentions and build the practical skills, confidence, and culture needed to have these conversations before silence takes hold. From Mental Health First Aid training and manager development to tailored workshops and strategic consultancy, our evidence-based programmes are built around real workplace pressures rather than generic checklists.
Take a look through our services brochure to see the full range of training and consultancy options, or drop us a line at info@mhib.co.uk to talk through what's happening in your organisation and where the gaps might be. Sometimes the first step to breaking a silence is simply picking up the phone.
