Mental Health at Work: Why Time Matters

When we think about mental health at work, time often appears as a problem. There is not enough of it. Deadlines are tighter. Demands accumulate. Priorities change quickly. People move from one task, meeting or message to another, often with little space in between.

But time matters to mental health at work in another, less visible way.

It is not only about having enough time to do the work. It is also about having time to think about the work. And perhaps, more fundamentally, about recognizing that understanding and transforming work also take time.

When there is no time to think about work

Today’s organizations increasingly expect people to adapt, learn, collaborate, take initiative and respond to changing situations. All of these require more than simply following instructions. They require people to interpret situations, make judgments, adjust what they do, learn from experience and sometimes question established ways of working.

In other words, they require reflexivity.

Yet the conditions in which people work do not always leave much room for it.

When workloads increase, deadlines shorten, resources become tighter and activity is organized around continuous demands, the moments in which people can stop and think about what they are doing can easily disappear.

This creates a paradox: We increasingly ask people to reflect, adapt and learn — while giving them less and less time in which to do so.

The consequences are not limited to learning or performance. They also matter for mental health.

Thinking about work is part of work

Much of what people actually do at work remains invisible. When there is no space to reflect on these experiences, difficulties can remain individualized.

Someone may think:

• I should manage my time better.
• I should be more resilient.
• I should learn to cope with pressure.

But when people have the opportunity to talk about their real work, a different picture can sometimes emerge. What appeared to be an individual difficulty may also be connected to competing priorities, unclear expectations, insufficient resources, conflicting criteria for quality, or organizational decisions.

Creating time to think about work therefore does not simply mean giving people a moment to express how they feel. It can create the conditions for something else: making work visible.

It allows people to examine what they are actually doing, what makes the work difficult, what they are trying to protect, and what might need to change. In this sense, reflexivity can become a resource for mental health at work.

Time is not only an individual resource

It would be easy, however, to turn this into another recommendation addressed to individuals: Take time to reflect. But where is that time supposed to come from? The availability of time is itself shaped by the way work is organized. Broader economic and social transformations can intensify expectations around speed, responsiveness, efficiency and productivity. Organizations translate these pressures through staffing decisions, objectives, deadlines, performance indicators, technologies and ways of coordinating work. These conditions eventually reach everyday activity.

A person may therefore have very little possibility of creating reflective space individually, however convinced they are of its value. This is why time should not only be considered a personal resource to manage more effectively.

It is also an organizational condition for reflexivity.

Making time to discuss work is not necessarily time taken away from work. It can itself be part of doing the work.

Change has its own temporality

There is another dimension of time that matters when organizations decide to act on mental health at work.

We often think about interventions in terms of content:

• What training should we provide?

• What workshop should we organize?

• What actions should we implement?

But another question is equally important:

What can this action realistically make possible at this moment in the life of the organization?

A workshop, training session or facilitated discussion can be extremely valuable. But it is still a moment within a longer organizational history.

In a few hours, people may begin to put experiences into words. They may recognize tensions that had previously remained invisible. They may discover that others experience similar difficulties. They may develop a different understanding of what is happening.

That is already significant.

But understanding does not always happen immediately.

Sometimes a first conversation reveals behaviours: communication difficulties, lack of feedback, tensions between colleagues.

Only later may the conditions behind those behaviours become more visible: conflicting priorities, insufficient resources, changing responsibilities, evaluation systems, or different understandings of what good work means.

And changing these conditions may require yet another timescale.

This is why an intervention should not necessarily be judged by whether it produces an immediate solution. Sometimes its most important contribution is to open something that can continue to be worked on.

Thinking in different timescales

Taking temporality seriously therefore changes the questions we ask about mental health at work.

• We can look at time within work: pace, deadlines, interruptions, urgency and the amount of time available to do work well.
• We can look at time to think about work: whether individuals and collectives have spaces to reflect on experience, discuss real work and learn from it.
• And we can look at the time of change: recognizing that understanding, experimenting and transforming work are processes rather than single events.

These different temporalities are connected.

Perhaps, then, one of the questions we should ask when designing mental health initiatives is:

What time are we creating — to understand, to discuss, to learn and, eventually, to change?