The companies getting ahead of mental health leave aren’t adding more services. They’re aiming the ones they have at the right people, through better-trained managers... before a request lands.
By Jennifer Limon, SVP, Strategic Alliances and Solutions, meQ
A Bloomberg Businessweek story just put a face on a trend HR was already feeling. Kendall McGill, a project manager in Baltimore, took a six-week mental health leave after being handed the workload of two people and dreading every meeting with her manager.
She sat by a window doing breathing exercises before each one-on-one. Then one day she just decided she wasn’t going back, at least not yet.
Bloomberg reports that 67% of US employers saw an increase in mental-health-related leaves of absence and accommodation requests over the past year, citing a survey from employment firm Littler Mendelson. For large employers the figure was 74%.
The trend has held since the pandemic, and it’s not slowing. McGill’s story is now the norm.
The response most companies have is to add more services. Bloomberg found employers expanding EAPs to include text therapy, adding on-site counseling, and layering in apps for meditation and grief support.
These are good benefits, and nearly every employer offers them. Leave requests keep climbing anyway.
The gap is not availability. It is that a benefit only helps the employee who reaches for it in time, and the employees closest to leave are often the least likely to go looking.
A menu of options does nothing for a company that can’t see who needs what, when.
Look again at McGill’s leave. The doubled workload and the months of dread before manager meetings preceded the request by a long stretch.
Individually, those signals are private and stay that way. In aggregate, patterns like heavy workload and rising strain on a team are visible in workforce data well before they turn into a wave of leaves.
Most benefit strategies only respond once the request arrives. The opportunity is to read the pattern earlier, when a team’s pressure is still something a company can act on.
The missing piece is not more resources. It is a workforce-wide system to identify where stress-related pressure is building and to get the right support to the right people before a request lands.
This kind of platform works at three levels:
Because companies treat leave as either an individual problem or a benefits problem, and the manager sits in between. They invest in individual services and org-wide programs, but skip the person closest to the buildup.
To be clear about what this is and is not: managers are not being asked to spot who is struggling or to play counselor. They are being given coaching skills that build a stronger, steadier team, which is a different thing from surveillance or triage.
The cost of missing the advanced warnings is real. Bloomberg cites Gallup’s estimate that a missed workday runs about $340 for a full-time worker, or $47.6 billion a year in lost US productivity.
meQ’s own research points the other way. Organizations with more resilient workforces see 25% fewer disability leave events, and meQ customers save over $400 a year in healthcare costs for every employee who uses meQ. Employees who do take leave return sooner and more engaged.
Reducing leave is not about limiting access to it. Leave is an important benefit, and there are times when people need it.
But it can be preventable. Seeing the early signs of burnout, equipping managers to respond, and routing people to support can reign in an issue before it becomes a formal absence. Those are shared wins for HR, finance, and employees.
That is the conversation my colleague Andrew Shatté and I are bringing to the DMEC Annual Conference in Nashville this August. Our session covers how thinking patterns, team dynamics, and organizational culture each shape leave outcomes, and what leaders can do at every level to get ahead of them.
Meet meQ at DMEC 2026, August 3–6 in Nashville. Find our session, or book an intro call to see how HR can turn early signals into fewer leaves.
