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Posted: Mon 3rd Aug 2026
Last updated: Mon 3rd Aug 2026
8 min read
Fewer than half of adults in England with symptoms of a common mental health condition receive any treatment, according to NHS England's latest Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey.
Statistically, some of those people work in small businesses.
And in companies of five to 50 people, there's often no HR department or occupational health team to catch them. The duty of care sits with whoever runs the company.
In plain English, duty of care means taking reasonable steps to protect your people's health, safety and wellbeing at work. And mental health counts just as much as physical safety.
It applies whether you employ five people or five thousand.
The legal definition, though, isn't the useful part. The useful question is this: if someone on your team was struggling tomorrow, would anything you have put in place actually reach them?
Duty of care in a small business is less about policies and more about conditions, meaning support that people know exists, trust enough to use and aren't punished for needing.
In a large company, responsibility is spread across HR, occupational health, line managers and a wellbeing budget.
In a small one, it rests with you, the founder (or owner).
That sounds like a burden – and sometimes it is – but it comes with a genuine advantage: you know your people.
You'll notice that someone has gone quiet in meetings or stopped taking lunch, long before any dashboard would flag it.
The same closeness cuts the other way. In a 10-person business, there's no neutral third party, so the person an employee would need to tell about a rough patch may also be the person who decides their next pay review.
That's why so much of duty of care in a small business comes down to trust rather than infrastructure.
Legally, nothing about being small exempts you.
The Health and Safety at Work Act, the Equality Act's requirement to make reasonable adjustments, and your common law duty of care all apply regardless of headcount.
What changes is how you meet them.
Plenty of small employers have bought something – like an employee assistance programme (EAP) bundled with their insurance, a meditation app subscription, or a wellbeing webinar.
Buying something is provision. Support is what happens when people:
know the thing exists
understand what it actually does
believe it's confidential
feel able to use it without consequence
An EAP nobody uses is a box ticked, not a team supported.
A useful test is whether everyone on your team could name what support is available and how to access it without asking you.
If the answer is no, you don't yet have support in place.
This is where I should be honest about my own record.
I'm Jack Murphy, founder of Wobble, a new and unique format of on-demand mental health support. Before I built anything in this space, I spent about a decade avoiding support myself.
There was no shortage of options available to me in that time. The problem was never provision, it was that nothing around me made using it feel normal.
That's the part a founder controls. Your openness sets the ceiling for everyone else's. If you treat pressure as something to hide, your team will hide theirs too.
None of this means oversharing or turning team meetings into group therapy.
It can be as small as admitting a week was hard, keeping a counselling appointment in your calendar as unapologetically as a dentist appointment, or asking how someone is and visibly waiting for the real answer.
People take their cues on what's safe to say from the most senior person in the room.
How support arrives matters almost as much as what it is.
A link buried in a handbook, or a one-line mention in a Friday round-up email, tells people they're not really meant to use it.
So don't do that. Instead, introduce anything new in person, whether that's a team meeting or a call.
Explain what it is, what it isn't and, crucially, who can see what. Because confidentiality is the first question in everyone's head and most employers never answer it.
Then keep it visible over time. Mention it during onboarding sessions, raise it again after the business has come through a demanding stretch, and make the connection for people.
Because if the last month has taken something out of everyone, that's exactly the moment to remind the team what's there.
The one thing you should never do is single anyone out. "You seem like you need this" turns support into an accusation.
You don't need a big budget to meet your duty of care well. Some of the most useful things cost nothing – for example:
a simple, visible document listing where to get help, including a GP, NHS 111 and Samaritans on 116 123
a named person people can talk to, who isn't the boss
flexibility that people use in practice, so a quiet day or an appointment doesn't require an interrogation
honest conversations about workload that happen before someone burns out rather than after
If you can spend a little, spend it on things people will use when it matters rather than perks that look good in a job advert. That might be:
a contribution towards counselling
mental health first aid training for one or two members of the team
pay-as-you-go support that only costs you something when someone actually uses it
A reasonable rule of thumb is that one thing your team trusts beats five things no-one touches.
You should never monitor anyone's personal health information – and you don't need to.
What you can watch, at an aggregate level, is whether people are using support at all, since most providers will tell you overall usage without identifying anyone.
You can also notice whether people take you up on flexibility, whether anyone ever mentions the support unprompted, and what patterns show up in conversations about absence or exit interviews.
The signal worth taking seriously is silence. If nothing you offer has been touched in six months, that's rarely because everyone is fine.
It usually means people either don't know about the support or don't trust it, and both of those are something you can fix.
You're not a therapist, and duty of care doesn't ask you to become one.
Your job is to notice, to ask, to make reasonable adjustments and to point people towards proper help – not to diagnose, counsel or manage a crisis.
If someone tells you about a diagnosed condition, the conversation to have is about adjustments at work, not treatment.
If someone is struggling in an ongoing way, the right nudge is towards their GP.
And if you're ever worried that someone's in immediate danger, that's a 999 call or a visit to A&E, with Samaritans available around the clock on 116 123.
In a small business, you meet your duty of care when three things are true – the person struggling knows where to go, they trust it enough to actually go, and their job is no worse off for them having gone.
