Wellness Action Plans: what are they and how can managers use them?

Conversations about mental health at work can become vague quite quickly.

A manager may want to be supportive, while the employee may know that something needs to change but find it difficult to explain exactly what would help.

A Wellness Action Plan, often shortened to WAP, gives that conversation some structure.

The approach used by Mind is designed for anyone, not only people with a diagnosed mental health condition. It encourages somebody to think in advance about what supports their wellbeing, situations that may affect it, signs they may be finding things more difficult and how they would like their manager to respond.

Mentally Healthy Workplace Training introduces Wellness Action Plans as one practical tool managers can use. The value is not in completing a form for its own sake. It is in creating a clearer conversation about the individual, their work and the support that may be useful.

What is a Wellness Action Plan?

Mind describes a Wellness Action Plan as a personalised, practical tool that can be used whether or not somebody has a mental health problem.

It is intended to help a person identify what keeps them well at work, what may contribute to them becoming unwell and what can be done if they begin to experience mental health difficulties.

That makes it useful before a problem reaches crisis point.

A person might complete a plan while they are well, while they are experiencing difficulties, as part of a conversation about workplace support or during a return to work. Mind provides different versions for people working mainly in a workplace, remotely or in a hybrid arrangement.

The current templates and guidance are available from Mind's Wellness Action Plan resources.

A WAP can be useful without a diagnosis

Someone does not need to have a diagnosed mental health condition to complete a Wellness Action Plan.

The plan is about understanding what helps that particular person work well and stay well, not proving that they have a particular condition.

What might a Wellness Action Plan cover?

The exact questions vary between templates, but the useful themes are consistent.

What helps someone stay well at work

This might include working routines, communication, relationships, breaks, opportunities to concentrate, contact with colleagues or ways of organising the working day.

What helps will be different for different people.

Situations that may affect wellbeing

Someone may identify particular pressures, working conditions or situations that make their mental health harder to manage.

These could relate to workload, uncertainty, conflict, difficult conversations, isolation, interruptions, travel, changes in routine or something outside work that has an effect while they are there.

The purpose is not to produce a list of weaknesses. It is to understand which situations may need more thought.

Early signs that things are becoming more difficult

A person may notice their own early warning signs before other people do.

They might know, for example, that when they are under sustained pressure they become quieter, find concentration harder, work longer hours or stop taking proper breaks.

Writing this down can help the employee and manager recognise a change earlier, but it should not turn the manager into an observer looking for symptoms.

What the employee can do

A WAP also leaves room for the individual's own strategies.

That matters because workplace support is not something done to an employee. The person completing the plan remains closely involved in deciding what helps them and what they can do themselves.

What support from the manager may help

This is often the part that makes the plan particularly useful at work.

The employee can describe the kind of support they would find helpful, such as clearer priorities, a regular check-in, advance notice of changes where possible, help reviewing workload or a conversation if agreed warning signs are noticed.

The manager can then discuss what is realistic and appropriate rather than having to guess.

What a Wellness Action Plan can and cannot do

It can help

make wellbeing conversations more specific
identify what helps somebody stay well at work
record agreed ways a manager can provide support
give an employee a way to describe early warning signs and preferred responses
provide useful structure during a return-to-work or support conversation
create a record that can be reviewed when circumstances change

It does not

diagnose a mental health condition
make the manager responsible for treatment or recovery
guarantee that somebody will remain well
replace a work-related stress risk assessment
replace the employer's duty to consider reasonable adjustments where that duty applies
mean that every request written into a plan must automatically be agreed

How can managers use a Wellness Action Plan?

Give the person time to think

A useful plan needs reflection. Mind advises managers to give team members time to consider the questions rather than expecting them to complete a WAP immediately in a meeting. For somebody who has never thought about what keeps them well at work, the answers may not be obvious straight away.

Discuss the plan in an appropriate setting

Arrange enough time and privacy for the conversation. The employee should be able to explain the plan in their own words. The manager's job is to listen, ask useful questions and understand what the person is saying rather than steering them towards the answers the manager expects.

Explore the support being requested

Some suggestions may be simple management arrangements. Others may need discussion with HR, Occupational Health or another part of the organisation. If a proposed change affects duties, hours, workplace arrangements or another formal aspect of the job, it may also need to be considered alongside the organisation's reasonable-adjustments processes.

Be clear about what has been agreed

A useful WAP distinguishes between an idea somebody would find helpful and an arrangement the manager and employee have actually agreed. If something cannot be provided as suggested, explain that and explore whether another option could address the same difficulty.

Come back to it

Mind recommends treating a Wellness Action Plan as a live, flexible document. Regular one-to-ones or other agreed check-ins provide an opportunity to ask what is working, what is not and whether anything has changed.

The employee should retain ownership of the plan

A WAP works best when it reflects the employee's own experience rather than becoming a manager's assessment of them.

Managers can ask questions, discuss what support is possible and explain organisational responsibilities, but they should avoid filling the plan with assumptions about what somebody ought to need.

Mind's manager guidance places particular emphasis on listening and allowing the team member to describe their experience in their own words.

That does not mean managers have no role in the discussion. The workplace still has operational requirements, policies and responsibilities. The point is that the plan begins with the individual's understanding of what helps them, followed by an honest conversation about what can be agreed.

Think about confidentiality before information is shared

A Wellness Action Plan can contain personal information, so the employee and manager should be clear about how it will be handled.

Mind's guidance says the team member should be involved in deciding whether the plan is held more widely, for example by HR, or kept between them and their manager, subject to situations where information has to be shared for a legitimate reason.

The manager should not assume that because an employee has discussed something privately, the whole team can be told.

Sometimes colleagues may need limited information for a working arrangement to make sense. In that situation, it is better to agree with the employee what genuinely needs to be shared and how it will be explained.

Managers should follow their organisation's own confidentiality, data protection and record-keeping arrangements.

A WAP and a reasonable adjustment are not the same thing

There can be overlap between a Wellness Action Plan and reasonable adjustments, but they perform different jobs.

A WAP is a broader wellbeing and conversation tool. Anybody can use one. It might record things the employee does themselves, ordinary management support, useful working preferences and signs that they would like a manager to notice.

A reasonable adjustment has a specific legal context. Under the Equality Act 2010, employers have a duty to make reasonable adjustments where the relevant disability requirements are met.

A WAP may help identify an adjustment that needs to be considered, but completing the plan does not itself decide whether a particular change is a reasonable adjustment.

Keeping those ideas separate helps managers use the WAP for what it does well: starting a practical conversation and recording what the individual and manager have learned about useful support.

The plan is a prompt for conversation, not the conversation itself

A completed form can be useful, but the quality of the discussion around it matters more.

The manager still needs to listen. The employee still needs space to explain what they mean. Both need to be able to revisit an arrangement that is not working.

Used in that way, a Wellness Action Plan can make conversations about mental health less dependent on guesswork. It gives the employee a way to describe what helps, and gives the manager something concrete to discuss, agree and review.