The Thought Co. / P1

the workplace mental health audit

Five minutes. Twelve questions. Four levels. It scores your employee mood support system.

An engagement survey measures how people feel about the company. It cannot measure whether a struggling person could actually get help. This audit measures the second thing.

The P1 Workplace Mental Health Audit is a free, 5 minute self assessment for HR and People leaders in India. It scores a company's mental health support system across four areas: access, stigma in practice, manager capability, and visibility.

What usually gets checked instead

The engagement survey. Cheap, established, and blind to this. Two or three wellbeing items in forty questions means fine scores prove nothing either way.

The EAP line item. Coverage exists. Whether anyone uses it is a number most companies have never asked their vendor for.

Nothing formal. Zero cost on paper. The cost arrives anyway, as attrition and absence, paid without an invoice.

The four levels

  • AAccess. Can someone reach confidential help at 11pm without asking permission?
  • BStigma in practice. What actually happened last time distress became visible?
  • CManager capability. Do managers know what to do, or do you run a lottery?
  • DVisibility. Can you see any of this working, or not working?

You answer as the person who runs People. "Don't know" is always an option, and it is scored as a finding, not a fail. This is a clinician designed* instrument, and sometimes the honest result is: don't buy anything yet.

honest answers only. the score is only as honest as you are.

No login. No email. Nothing you answer leaves this page or gets stored anywhere.

Disclaimer. This is a structural self assessment of workplace systems. It is not a clinical instrument, a diagnostic tool, or professional advice, and it does not measure any individual's mental health. Results are indicative and only as reliable as a single respondent's knowledge.

* Clinician designed, framework traceable. Not "validated": the scoring model has not yet been tested against outcomes. We would rather tell you than round up.

How honest is this instrument?

A single informant, self report structural audit: one HR Head answering from their own knowledge. Strong face and content validity (every item maps to an established construct or TTC practice data), and it deliberately trades away what employee surveys have: multiple perspectives. Known limits, stated rather than hidden: single respondent bias, recall bias on the "last real instance" items, and residual social desirability.

A

Level A · 3 questions

access

Can someone get help at 11pm without asking anyone's permission? The structural precondition. If this level scores 0, almost nothing else the company buys will get used.

ends with one email to your vendor. that's the whole fix.

Access

1 / 12

It is 11pm on a Tuesday. Someone on your team decides, tonight, that they need to talk to a professional. What can they actually do?

The structural precondition for utilisation exists. Everything else builds on this.
Coverage with a tollgate. Every internal touchpoint on the route deletes a percentage of the people who would have used it.
Goodwill, not a system. Goodwill doesn't work at 11pm.
The route may exist on paper; it doesn't exist in the head of the person running People. Which means it doesn't exist for employees either.
Why this question exists

Confidentiality concern is the most consistently documented suppressor of workplace help seeking, and the WHO's 2022 workplace guidance treats accessible confidential support as a core employer duty. Usage is a design problem, and the design starts here.

Access

2 / 12

From "I need help" to sitting in a first session. How long does that take here?

The system moves at the speed of the crisis.
Workable, with leakage.
The provider's calendar is the real gatekeeper. Expect your utilisation number to show it.
Walk it before buying anything new. It costs one afternoon.
Why this question exists

The decision to seek help is a window, not a state. It closes. This item is grounded in clinical practice rather than a single canonical citation, and it stays in because this is where access quietly fails: a route that takes three weeks is a route that mostly isn't taken.

Access

3 / 12

An employee uses the support. Who at the company could, in principle, find out?

Trust by design. The single strongest predictor of honest usage.
The invoice trail is a disclosure channel. Employees behave as if it is, because it is.
Visible usage means your programme serves only the people with nothing to lose by being seen. That is the smallest and least at risk group.
Audit this before anything else. It costs one email to your vendor.
Why this question exists

Indian employees conceal symptoms specifically because they fear workplace consequences (Poddar and Chhajer 2024, BMC Public Health, Indian sample). A promise ("it's confidential") and an architecture (the employer structurally cannot see) produce completely different usage.

B

Level B · 3 questions

stigma in practice

Not the values deck. What actually happened, the last time, on a Friday afternoon. Behaviour is the only thing that predicts whether people come forward.

you'll meet Meera. judge her fate, not your company.

Stigma in practice

4 / 12

Think of the last time someone's distress became visible at work. Tears in a meeting, a shutdown, a visible struggle. What actually happened next?

Support behaviour is installed, not aspirational.
Kindness without confidentiality. The team learning about it is the stigma event, however warm the handling.
Distress is being processed as a performance issue. People have noticed. They will not come forward again.
The most important result in this audit: distress is invisible from where you sit. That is not an absence of distress. It is an absence of signal.
Why this question exists

Stigma research (Corrigan's label avoidance work) shows attitudes and behaviour diverge; only behaviour predicts help seeking. Asking for the last real instance closes the gap between the values deck and the Friday afternoon reality.

Stigma in practice

5 / 12

Meera, a strong performer, tells her manager she has been struggling with her mental health. Six months later, what is true?

Disclosure is safe here, and word of that travels. This is how utilisation compounds.
Outcomes depend on personality, not system. Improvised kindness helps Meera; it doesn't help the next person with a colder manager.
The quiet penalty. Employees model this precisely. Expect near zero disclosure and a spotless engagement survey.
Honest, and diagnostic: variance across managers is the absence of a system. Level C is about exactly this.
Why this question exists

Disclosure decisions run on anticipated consequences, not policy. The third option encodes the documented informal consequence pattern: the penalty that never appears in any HR record. The scenario format exists so you judge a character's fate rather than defend your company.

Stigma in practice

6 / 12

An employee needs two days for their mental health. What does the leave application actually say?

Rare, and worth protecting.
"We all know the code" means the need exists and the safety doesn't. Your absence data is fiction, which also means your wellbeing reporting is.
Pushing through is presenteeism: the cost channel Deloitte prices in billions, and it precedes the resignation you won't see coming.
The leave data exists. Nobody has asked it this question. One afternoon of analysis.
Why this question exists

Absence mislabelling is the cheapest observable stigma marker a company has. It is sitting in the leave records. Deloitte India's 2022 survey (around 4,000 respondents; 59% reporting depression symptoms; 20% having resigned to cope) shows the scale of what is being relabelled as fever.

C

Level C · 3 questions

manager capability

The only RCT evidence in this whole space sits in this level. The question is whether you built the capability or run a lottery.

you'll meet Arjun. he manages eight people and nobody trained him.

Manager capability

7 / 12

Arjun manages eight people. Was he ever actually taught what to do when one of them is struggling, with practice, not just a talk?

You have built the highest ROI capability in this domain, per the only RCT evidence in this space.
A single session decays. Assume it has.
Every struggling employee's outcome currently depends on which manager they report to. That variance is invisible until it is an exit interview.
Why this question exists

Milligan-Saville et al. 2017 (Lancet Psychiatry, cluster RCT): manager mental health training produced measurable effects on employee sickness absence. Gayed et al. 2018 (Occup Environ Med, meta analysis): training improves manager knowledge, attitudes, and response behaviour. Rehearsal is what separates training that changes behaviour from a sensitisation slide deck.

Manager capability

8 / 12

Someone on Arjun's team has gone quiet for three weeks. Camera off, work slipping. What is Arjun supposed to do?

Noticing converts to referral. This is the mechanism behind every high utilisation programme.
HR becomes the funnel, which reintroduces the confidentiality tax and buries the signal in the least confidential office in the building.
You have a lottery, not a system.
The honest version of many Indian companies' real position. Scored lowest because it converts your entire management layer from sensor to blind spot.
Why this question exists

The gatekeeper model: the training evidence only works when noticing has a named next step. "Escalate to HR" scores 1, not 2, deliberately. HR as the default route recreates the disclosure problem the access questions measure.

Manager capability

9 / 12

And when Arjun himself is struggling, the person who catches everyone else, where does he go?

Genuinely rare. Your support system covers its own load bearing walls.
The exposure tax makes it unusable. For managers, "confidential in principle" reads as "career visible in practice."
Managers absorb it until they leave or break, and either way you lose the team's shock absorber.
Ask your managers. Privately. The answers tend to be short and identical.
Why this question exists

A clinical observation from practice, not a cited finding: managers and HR are the most exposed and least likely to use the support they route others toward, because visibility feels like a demotion risk. Capability includes the carrier.

D

Level D · final 3

visibility

Can you see any of this working? Utilisation, the survey, the exits. The level your CFO will ask about.

last three. the money questions.

Visibility

10 / 12

What percentage of your employees used your mental health support last year?

You can manage what you are measuring. You are in a small minority.
The number exists and isn't being used. Your vendor is reporting into a void, and renewal decisions are being made on vibes.
You are paying for coverage with no idea whether it is used. That is not a benefit. It is a line item.
At least you know. Companies with unused EAPs know less than you do.
Why this question exists

Utilisation is the one number that reveals whether support is real or theatrical. This tool asks the question without asserting industry norms, because those figures are still being verified for sourcing and denominators.

Visibility

11 / 12

Your engagement survey came back. Can it tell you whether a struggling employee could actually get help here?

Your survey asks answerable questions about support. Keep it. Most don't.
Wellbeing is statistically present and diagnostically absent. Fine scores here mean nothing either way.
The exact condition this audit was built for: reassurance from an instrument that cannot see the thing it is reassuring you about.
You are not misinformed, just uninformed. Arguably the better position.
Why this question exists

The audit's founding insight. An engagement survey measures how people feel about the company; it cannot measure whether a struggling person could get help. Fleming 2024 (Industrial Relations Journal; N=46,336 across 233 organisations; cross sectional, so support, not proof) points the evidence at systems over individual sentiment.

Visibility

12 / 12

Of the people who resigned last year, how many left for wellbeing reasons?

You can price this problem for your CFO. That is budget conversation material.
Polite answers are the exit interview's default setting. Assume undercount.
Some share of your regretted attrition is wellbeing driven and currently filed under "better offer." You are paying for this gap annually. You have just never seen the invoice.
Why this question exists

Deloitte India 2022: 20% of respondents had already resigned to cope with their mental health, and almost none of those exits were logged as that. Attrition is where the invisible costs become a number the CFO already tracks.

The Thought Co. / P1 scorecard

out of 24.

By level

  • A · Access
  • B · Stigma in practice
  • C · Manager capability
  • D · Visibility

Fix this first

a "don't know" is a finding, not a fail.

This score is only as honest as your answers. Single informant, self report, clinician designed, framework traceable. Not yet validated against outcomes, and it says so. Indicative, not clinical, and not professional advice.

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A 15 minute conversation about the result, not a pitch. Or write to hello@thethoughtco.in.

The Thought Co. · 14.3 Mahalaxmi Industrial Estate, Danik Shivneri Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai 400013 · hello@thethoughtco.in

Nothing you answered left this page. There is no login, no tracking of your answers, and nothing stored.

This audit is a structural self assessment, not a clinical instrument or professional advice. It scores systems, never people.