The performance of being fine

The most convincing performance in most workplaces happens before nine in the morning. Someone sits in the car park for a minute longer than they need to, checks their face in the mirror, and walks in fine. They will say fine several times before lunch. They will hit their targets this month, as they did last month, and nothing in any report you receive will suggest a problem.

In clinical work we meet the person in the car park all the time. What surprises leaders is how expensive that performance is, and how reliably the workplace applauds it.

The cost of showing up anyway

Absence gets measured because absence leaves a gap in the roster. Presenteeism leaves no gap. The person is there, answering emails, attending meetings, running at some fraction of themselves, and no system in the building records the difference.

The scale of that blind spot is startling. Deloitte's 2024 UK analysis put the total cost of poor mental health to employers at £51bn a year. Of that, absence accounts for about £7bn. Presenteeism accounts for around £24bn, more than three times as much. The costly problem is not the empty desk. It is the occupied one.

What the mask does to the person wearing it

Clinically, sustained masking is one of the most draining things a person can do. Holding a composed face over genuine distress takes real effort, hour after hour, and that effort comes out of the same reserves the job needs. Concentration thins. Sleep suffers. Patience goes at home first, where the audience is safest.

The mask does something else, too. It delays help. As long as the performance is holding, the person can tell themselves things are manageable, and everyone around them agrees because the performance is all they can see. By the time the mask slips, what might have been a few good conversations in spring has often become a long absence in autumn.

And here is the awkward part for employers. The workplace rewards the mask. The person performing fine is praised for resilience, given the difficult accounts, held up as the steady one. Every signal they receive says keep going. Watch the high performer, we often say to leaders. The colleague you would rank last for wellbeing risk is frequently the one carrying the most, precisely because carrying it well is what they are known for.

A room where the mask can come off

You cannot ask people to stop coping. What you can do is give the coping somewhere safe to rest for an hour a month.

That is the quiet logic of monthly, confidential one-to-one sessions for every member of staff, delivered by qualified psychologists and accredited psychotherapists who sit outside the management reporting line, with the same clinician each time. Because everyone attends as a matter of course, there is no flag raised by walking in the door. Because the clinician is from an outside company, independent of the employer, nothing said in the room touches a career. Individual sessions are private, names and stories never leave the room, and GDPR is observed throughout.

What leadership receives instead is The Listening Post, a monthly report of anonymised themes. Not who is struggling, but what the organisation is carrying, workload pressure here, change fatigue there, while there is still time to act on it. Prevention rather than intervention, month after ordinary month.

The performance of being fine will go on tomorrow morning either way. The only question is whether anyone ever gets an hour when they do not have to give it.