Today is World Mental Health Day. The WHO warns that a significant portion of this issue, which increasingly reaches pandemic levels, stems largely from what happens in the workplace. Approximately 1 in 8 people worldwide live with a mental health condition, and these issues are among the leading causes of workplace disability. It’s estimated that companies lose nearly $1 trillion each year due to a lack of mental well-being at work.

We are facing one of the greatest threats to humanity. While we continue to debate the risks of artificial intelligence, spend hours in the gym to achieve the perfect body, or focus on maintaining a healthy diet, our minds remain the most neglected aspect—and without mental health, nothing else matters.

In recent months, much of our effort has been devoted to naming and understanding this problem because we refuse to accept that work is a necessary evil. It cannot be that we spend most of our waking lives in places we dislike, doing tasks that don't fulfill us. This leads to a range of conditions with various symptoms, which can be summarized in an index that measures an individual’s workplace well-being. Our findings from samples involving over 30,000 people are, to say the least, significant. Here are a few key insights:

1. Commitment and workplace well-being are not the same: We have met people who are deeply committed to their companies but suffer from serious work-related conditions that prevent them from thriving. We have also seen the opposite: individuals with excellent workplace well-being but little commitment to the organization. The disconnect between these two concepts shows that commitment can be manipulated and obtained through external incentives, a common tool in management practices. The industrial legacy of the job market has evolved very little in terms of incentive systems, leading to significant dissonance. We artificially keep people in companies, resulting in substantial losses in workplace well-being, and consequently, in mental health.
2. Which comes first, commitment or well-being? This question is reminiscent of the classic chicken-and-egg dilemma. According to our data, well-being comes before commitment, not the other way around. This indicates who should take the first step. The notion that people must come to work already motivated does not align with the evidence. Organizations have the opportunity to create environments that foster the well-being of their employees. And it’s not about having foosball tables, cool offices, or branded swag... It’s about offering a job that matches your interests and skills, having a manager who knows how to bring out the best in you, trusts you, and gives you space to thrive, and working with colleagues you can rely on and connect with, in an environment where you can be yourself and where different ways of thinking and being are embraced. These kinds of environments boost workplace health, leading to a significant increase in genuine and sustainable commitment—not a manufactured or artificial one.
3. Different professional profiles have different levels of workplace well-being: Our methodology is based on the Harvard cultures framework, which helps us identify cultural predispositions and map personality patterns in each quadrant. When analyzing the relationship between cultural predisposition and workplace well-being, we found some striking conclusions: profiles that are fast-paced, achievement-oriented, and highly active tend to experience more intense work-related conditions over shorter periods of time. This poses a challenge for companies with a large number of employees with this cultural predisposition, as absenteeism and turnover rates tend to spike.

On the other hand, environments with a predisposition towards stability and order tend to have much higher levels of workplace well-being. This is not just our opinion—the data speaks for itself.

Today is a crucial day, one that should prompt us to reflect on what we are doing wrong in the world of work. All of us—employees, companies, institutions, and governments—must recognize that this problem is the greatest threat to any business, and arguably to humanity as a whole. The rules of the past worked in a different context. This new reality demands different rules, and the mental health statistics are warning us that we are "crazy" if we continue down this path.