Mental health holiday policy

If you want to allow your employees to take a designated date off work each year as a mental health holiday, outside their normal annual leave provisions, you can put our policy in place.

Promoting mental health

If you would like to introduce an annual mental health holiday day for your staff, the purpose of which is to place increased long-term focus on their mental health and wellbeing, you can implement it using our Mental Health Holiday Policy. You can choose any date in the year for the mental health holiday, and it makes sense to coincide it with a quiet work period. The important thing is that you make clear to staff at the start of each year what date you’ve designated as that year’s mental health holiday, and it’s best to keep it entirely separate from annual leave entitlement.

Eligibility

We’ve given you the option in our policy of providing that your employees must have a minimum period of service before they qualify for this additional day off. Given its purpose though, it’s probably preferable to apply it to everyone regardless of length of employment. With part-time employees, our policy provides for the day off to apply equally to them too because it might be hard to pro rata it properly and your office might be closed for the day anyway. However, if the designated date isn’t one of their working days, you’ll need to consider granting them an alternative date (or pro rata hours) off on what is one of their working days, due to the impact of the Part-time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000 (unless you can justify less favourable treatment here on objective grounds). With employees who are already off sick on the designated date, our policy provides they won’t qualify for an additional day off, except at your absolute discretion. Your key consideration here is to ensure you’re not treating disabled employees unfavourably because of their sickness absence - you would again then need to show your treatment is objectively justified. As regards those on maternity, paternity, adoption or shared parental leave, they have a general right to benefit from the terms of employment that would have been applicable if they hadn’t been absent (except for remuneration), so arguably they should still accrue this additional day off, to be taken on their return from such leave.

Policy operation

We’ve provided that if the employee doesn’t take the day off work on the designated date, they can’t take it on an alternative date (but, in practice, this is subject to the considerations highlighted above), and neither can they carry it forward or receive a payment in lieu.