What Organizations Forget About Mental Health
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Written by Shahrukh Asif Khan, Chief Vision and Culture Officer
Shahrukh Khan, DBA Candidate, MBA, QArb., is an arbitration and mediation professional, labour relations specialist, and academic leader focused on workplace dispute resolution and policy compliance. His research and practice advance DEI, talent management, legislative compliance, and leadership strategy in higher education and industry.
Organizations cannot control everything that affects an employee’s mental health. They can control whether the processes an employee moves through protect that person’s dignity or slowly wear it down.
A loss I am still sitting with
This week I lost a friend to suicide. He was also a mentee, someone whose future I was invested in, and someone I had the privilege of watching blossom into a spectacular young adult.
I have been distraught. As I sit with the loss, though, I keep returning to the years that came before it: a job that changed, processes that changed with it, conflict, complaints, grievances, restructuring, and finally a layoff.
I want to be careful about what I am claiming here. Suicide is complex. There are parts of a person’s life, and of their mental health, that even the people closest to them never fully see. I cannot say that a workplace caused my friend’s death, and I will not. This is also not a story about one bad manager or one bad organization.
But losing him has changed the first question I ask when I read a workplace policy. Not whether it was followed, but what it did to the person who had to live through it.
What I watched happen
He was doing well. He won a case competition, secured full-time work, and was making music on the side. He gave time to equity and inclusion efforts in his community. He came to Canada as an international student and built a life here largely on his own, from scratch.
Then his job changed. The processes he was expected to follow changed with it, and drastically. Expectations moved. His relationship with his manager became strained, and so did a few relationships with colleagues.
It would be easy to turn this into a story about a manager. I do not think that would be fair. Managers work inside systems they did not design. They inherit processes, they carry accountability for outcomes, and they are often handed poor tools for the people side of the job.
What I watched was more complicated than blame. His performance started to dip, but his ability had not evaporated. What eroded was his confidence, his self-esteem, and his sense that he could still succeed.
Grievances and complaints followed. I was close to those processes. People were coached. The conduct continued anyway. Meaningful change did eventually come, but by then restructuring was underway, his position was affected, and he was laid off. After years of struggling, he finally saw some light. He never got the chance to sit in it.
Psychological safety is tested when things go wrong
Psychological safety shows up in many leadership programs and strategic plans. The real test isn't the day everything is going well. It is the day someone is struggling.
Can an employee say that they do not understand a new process? Can they push back on a decision? Can they ask for more support, raise a concern about a colleague, or file a complaint without believing the complaint itself will follow them for the rest of their career?
When performance starts to slip, the first question is usually what is wrong with the employee. The better question, and the harder one, is what changed around them. Research on organizational change gives us reason to take that seriously. Repeated rounds of change have been associated with higher job insecurity, more role ambiguity, and more mental health complaints (Fløvik et al., 2019).
Encouraging people to speak up is the easy half. The half that decides whether anyone believes you is what happens after they do.
Sometimes it is the process that is broken, not the person
Job design is complicated. Organizations evolve, technology changes, roles get consolidated, and a position that needed one set of skills last year needs another this year. People do have to adapt.
But the organization has work to do during that adaptation too. Were the new expectations clear? Was the person trained? Were the processes themselves actually finished before people were held to them? Was there coaching, regular feedback, and a reasonable runway?
An employee who cannot do the job and an employee who has not yet been set up to do the job look identical on a performance report. They are not the same person, and they do not need the same response. That distinction is worth making before anyone reaches for a performance improvement plan.
This is also where the wellness conversation gets thin. Counseling, employee assistance programs, and resilience training all have value, and I am not dismissing any of them. But coaching someone to cope better with a process we could have fixed feels incomplete. The evidence points the same way. Organizational interventions that address workload and work design are associated with reduced exhaustion, with the strongest results when structural change is paired with support for the individual rather than offered instead of it (Bes et al., 2023).
So the question is not only how we make people more resilient. It is what we are asking them to be resilient against.
Coaching two people separately does not repair the relationship between them
There is a lesson here I keep coming back to. Sometimes coaching is not enough. When a manager and an employee have fallen into a dysfunctional pattern, coaching each of them on their own can improve behavior without fixing anything between them. Expectations stay misaligned. Intentions keep getting misread. Every new interaction gets filtered through the last one.
It is rarely personal at the start. But a professional disagreement handled badly for long enough becomes personal, and once it does, it is very hard to walk back. Mediation would often serve everyone better than another round of corrective conversations, a facilitated session to bring expectations back in line, reset the role, and let both people explain how they arrived at a conflict neither of them set out to create. Accountability still matters. But accountability and repair are not opposites.
Complaints run on two different clocks
I have spent a lot of time inside grievance and dispute resolution processes, and this is the thing that is easiest to forget. Organizational time and human time are not the same thing.
A few weeks to gather information is reasonable on an organizational calendar. For the person who filed, it is another Monday walking into the same building. Another hallway interaction with someone involved. Another week with no news, and another weekend spent thinking about Monday.
These processes do have to be fair. Respondents have rights, evidence takes time, and nothing should be rushed just to give someone closure. But procedural fairness should not turn into procedural silence. If a matter genuinely needs months, then someone needs to think about what those months are doing to the people inside them. Communication, interim measures, check-ins, and timelines that a human being can actually endure are all part of the process, not extras attached to it.
The justice research is consistent on this point. How people are informed and treated during a process shapes their wellbeing, not only the decision that comes out the other end (Brenner et al., 2014).
An exit is still an exit for a person
Layoffs are sometimes necessary. Funding disappears, programs end, and positions become redundant. Saying that out loud does not require pretending organizations can never restructure.
But the two sides of a layoff do not look alike. One side of the page has headcount, position, notice, and severance. The other side has income, identity, routine, colleagues, belonging, confidence, and plans that are now gone. Downsizing has been associated with depressive symptoms both for people who lose their jobs and for those who stay (Brenner et al., 2014), which is worth remembering when the announcement ends and everyone is expected to carry on.
Context matters here too. My friend had come to Canada as a student. Like many people who build a life in a new country, his family and oldest support networks were thousands of miles away, and his job was tied to more than income. It held his stability, his professional identity, and the future he was working toward.
That is not a reason to make assumptions about international students or newcomers, and it does not make an employer responsible for every part of an employee’s life. It does mean equity requires context. Treating everyone identically is not always the same thing as treating everyone fairly.
Compassion does not lower a performance standard, excuse misconduct, or block a necessary restructuring. A hard conversation can still be respectful. Performance can be addressed without humiliating anyone. Employment can end without stripping a person of their dignity on the way out.
The question I am left with
I wish my friend were still here. I wish I could see where his music went, what he built professionally, and the person he kept becoming.
I cannot change what happened. But losing him has permanently added a question to the ones I already ask when I look at a policy or a process. Not only whether the process was followed. Not only whether the organization was compliant. Not even only whether the outcome was fair. Also, what did this process do to the human being who went through it?
Policies will always be imperfect, and organizations will always have hard decisions to make. But dignity should not be optional, psychological safety should matter most when people are struggling, and compassion should never be treated as something separate from good management.
Behind every grievance number, investigation file, performance plan, and line on a spreadsheet is a person. There must always be a human at the end of the process.
A note on mental health
This article discusses suicide. If you are in Canada and thinking about suicide, or are worried about someone who may be, call or text 9-8-8 for 24/7 crisis support. If someone is in immediate danger, call 911. Outside Canada, this list crisis lines by country.
Read more from Shahrukh Asif Khan
Shahrukh Asif Khan, Chief Vision and Culture Officer
Shahrukh Khan, DBA Candidate, MBA, QArb., is an academic leader, arbitration and mediation professional, and labour relations specialist focused on workplace dispute resolution and organizational governance. A Qualified Arbitrator and former Lead Negotiator and Vice President of Grievance, he brings deep expertise in collective bargaining, grievance arbitration, and labour-management relations. He is also an expert in policy auditing and development, ensuring legislative compliance and strengthening governance frameworks. His research centers on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), talent management, and labour relations, examining how inclusive policy and leadership strategy drive sustainable organizational performance.
References:
Bes, I., et al. (2023). Organizational interventions and exhaustion.
Brenner, M. H., et al. (2014). Organizational downsizing, justice perceptions and depressive symptoms. PLOS ONE.
Fløvik, L., et al. (2019). Organizational change and the psychosocial work environment.
