May 21, 2026

Workplace mental health entered a new phase in 2026 shifting from what companies offer to whether employees find those commitments believable.

Recent Glassdoor data find mentions of burnout in reviews are up 65% year-over-year and 2.5x higher than pre-pandemic levels. Additionally, burned-out workers who once job-hunted their way out of their situations have stopped trying — not because things have improved, but because the labor market has left them nowhere to go.

Employees are now increasingly judging companies not by whether support for mental health issues like burnout exists, but whether leadership communicates it credibly, models it visibly and creates environments where people feel comfortable accessing tools and talking about it.

At the same time, economic anxiety, AI disruption and a difficult entry-level job market are shaping a generation of workers with very different expectations around trust, transparency and employer credibility.

The result: Workplace mental health is no longer just an HR initiative. It has become a strategic leadership and workforce trust priority.

ICYMI: We spoke with Noah Greenberg, CEO of Stacker, about why the future of thought leadership is shifting from coverage to citation and the growing importance of the corporate newsroom. Read it here.

The workplace mental health credibility gap

For employers, workplace mental health is both an employee engagement and reputation challenge.

The employee engagement angle:

• Employee engagement fell for the second consecutive year in 2025, the first back-to-back decline in Gallup’s history. Only 20% of employees worldwide are actively engaged.
• Nearly half of U.S. employees say they’ve left a job for reasons tied to their mental health.
• Just 65% of employees trust their senior leadership, according to the Qualtrics XM Institute’s 2025 Customer and Employee Trust Indices. The business case is straightforward: Trusted leaders drive engaged employees, engaged employees drive satisfied customers and satisfied customers drive profit.
• Nearly all large employers now offer Employee Assistance Programs, yet annual utilization rates often remain below 5%, according to the nonprofit mental health advocacy organization Mental Health America.

The reputation angle:

• The same Glassdoor data show burned-out employees are 76% less likely to give positive overall reviews and 78% less likely to recommend their employer. In a tight talent market, that reputational drag shows up in employer rankings and candidate pipelines.
• Companies on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list generate 8.5x more revenue per employee than the U.S. market average, and have delivered 3.5x higher cumulative stock return over the past 27 years compared to the 1,000 largest U.S. public companies by market capitalization, according to a 2025 report from Great Place To Work.
• “The internal is now permanently external,” PR News warned in its 2025 predictions. Every gap between what leadership says and what employees experience now plays out publicly — in talent markets, on review platforms and in how customers and investors interpret organizational character.
  • Case in point: Internal emails and layoff memos routinely leak to the media. In March, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei apologized after a memo leaked in which he called OpenAI staff “gullible.”

What this means for communicators

• Build a standing narrative, not a calendar. Mental health messaging that only appears in awareness months signals exactly what employees suspect: It’s performative.
• Pair every change announcement with human support. Nearly 6 in 10 employees say workplace stress rises during organizational transitions, yet only 12% have had access to mental health resources during those periods, according to research from TalentLMS and WorkTango.
• Prepare managers, not just employees. Nearly half of managers say they don’t know how to access mental health care through their employer-sponsored insurance, according to the 2025 NAMI Workplace Mental Health Poll. If managers can’t navigate the resources themselves, they can’t communicate them credibly to employees.
• Equip executives to lead visibly. When leaders speak openly about mental health, they normalize it. When they don’t, silence is its own message.
  • In action: At Salesforce, where executives openly discuss their therapy use, program utilization rates are three times higher than industry averages and their Mental Wellness Day policy reduced burnout-related resignations by 28%.

The bottom line

The organizations getting this right don’t necessarily have better programs. They understand that workforce trust is now a core reputation asset — and they manage internal credibility with the same rigor as external brand stewardship.

When what companies say matches what employees experience, the data is clear: Lower turnover, higher engagement and stronger performance. When it doesn’t, the gap rarely stays internal for long.

Mental Health Awareness Month

Globally, one in seven people — roughly 1.1 billion — are living with a mental health disorder.

The impact of these conditions on the workplace is staggering: According to the WHO, an estimated 12 billion working days are lost annually to depression and anxiety alone, costing approximately $1 trillion in lost productivity globally.

These numbers make the workplace credibility gap more than a talent issue — they reflect a global public health reality that organizations, communicators, and leaders can no longer treat as background noise.

Likewise, one in seven young people experience a mental health condition, yet most go unrecognized and untreated. Closing this gap requires solutions built by young people, not designed for them.

Global Gateway Advisors co-created OK Today with AFS Youth Assembly. It is a global, youth‑led mental health initiative focused on reducing stigma and equipping young people with the tools to support each other through peer‑to‑peer conversation, education, and leadership. Learn more about its mission.

Interested in partnering with OK Today or learning more? Reach out at OKToday@gga.nyc.

Key upcoming events

Leadership + Ideas

• Fortune COO Summit (Scottsdale, June 1-2) Fortune’s editors and top COOs from around the world will explore the strategies shaping the next generation of enterprise execution, from building shock-proof supply chains and human-AI workforces to harnessing agentic AI to reimagine workflows and operating models. Speakers include Venkatesh Alagirisamy, COO of Nike; Ayesha Molino, COO of MGM Resorts International; and Janelle Sallenave, COO of Chime.
• WSJ CEO Council Summit (London, UK, June 9-10) Drawing on the geopolitical and economic fault lines reshaping global business, this summit convenes CEOs of Europe’s leading banks, pharmaceutical companies and retailers to confront mounting risks — from AI disruption and energy constraints to eroding global institutions and escalating conflicts — and chart a path from uncertainty to opportunity. Participants include Fernando Fernandez, CEO of Unilever; Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament; and Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of 01.AI.
• Aspen Ideas Festival (Aspen, June 25-July 1 ) One of the world’s most celebrated gatherings of bold thinkers, the festival brings together hundreds of leaders from business, technology, public service, science and the arts for wide-ranging conversations on the ideas shaping tomorrow — from the AI revolution and geopolitics to leadership, culture, and the economy. Speakers include Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker; Fareed Zakaria, journalist and author; and Katie Couric, journalist and co-founder of Katie Couric Media.

AI + Tech

• Axios AI+NYC (New York City, June 3) Expect exclusive conversations with top innovators and visionaries on the next wave of AI transformation and its impact on business and the world. Speakers include Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM; Ariel Ekblaw, CEO of Aurelia Institute; and Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo.
• Bloomberg Tech (San Francisco, June 3-4) Led by the outlet’s Emily Chang and Tom Giles, this summit brings together leading CEOs, investors and innovators harnessing technology to change the world — covering everything from industrial robots and consumer electronics to data center buildout and the race to artificial general intelligence. Speakers include Daniela Amodei, president and co-founder of Anthropic; Fei-Fei Li, CEO of World Labs; and Alexandr Wang, chief AI officer of Meta. Contact us to meet up on site!
• Fortune Brainstorm Tech (Aspen, June 8-10) Returning for its 25th anniversary, this cross-disciplinary summit brings together the CEOs, investors and innovators tackling the most urgent challenges spanning industries and geographies — debating big questions and defining what comes next as global alliances shift, industries face upheaval, and intelligent technology advances at a breakneck pace. Speakers include Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic; Meg Whitman, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard; and Andrew Yang, CEO of Noble Mobile.
• Semafor Tech (San Francisco, June 10) A one-day AI-focused gathering that cuts through the hype to examine how emerging technologies, from quantum computing to humanoid robotics, will reshape markets, labor and geopolitics, with founders, investors, researchers and policy figures focused on what comes next in the real economy. Speakers include Daphne Koller, CEO of Insitro; Jeetu Patel, Chief Product Officer of Cisco; and Pete Shadbolt, Chief Scientific Officer of PsiQuantum.
• AI Summit London (London, UK, June 10-11) Now in its 10th annual edition and headlining London Tech Week, this summit moves past AI theory and into bottom-line impact — spanning 10 stages, 14 tracks and hands-on labs designed to help enterprises build, deploy and scale AI with confidence. Speakers include Anne-Claire Gerbaldi, Chief Digital, Data and AI Officer of AstraZeneca; Wendy Ng, AI Futurist at Marks and Spencer; and Anthony Hills, EMEA Enterprise Director at NVIDIA.

Health

• HLTH Europe 2026 (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 15-18) The continent’s premier healthcare innovation event, where global expertise meets local insight to tackle Europe’s most pressing challenges — from AI-driven diagnostics to reimagining patient care at scale. Speakers include Gianrico Farrugia, CEO of Mayo Clinic; Elena Bonfiglioli, Global GM of Health & Life Sciences at Microsoft; and Freddy Abnousi, VP of Health Technology at Meta.
• Healthcare of Tomorrow (Washington, D.C., June 17-18) U.S. News & World Report’s exclusive annual forum for hospital and health system executives to discuss AI’s transformation of care delivery, post-acute care and policy shifts, while gaining behind-the-scenes insight into the methodology powering the Best Hospitals rankings.
• BIO International Convention (San Diego, June 22-25) The world’s largest biotech gathering brings together 20,000 industry leaders from pharma, startups, academia and government across 130+ sessions spanning AI and digital health, cell and gene therapy, oncology and rare disease, with exclusive partnering meetings that make it the premier destination for business development in the life sciences. Speakers include Bradley Campbell, CEO of Amicus Therapeutics; Sandeep Menon, Chief Development Officer at Alnylam; and Jean Bennett, Professor Emerita at Penn Medicine.

Bookmark Global Gateway Advisors’ event tracker, updated weekly.

Media news

• An audience of AI agents. The Economist will now be writing for two distinct audiences: humans and AI — restructuring its marketing and editorial surfaces so AI answer engines can find, parse and surface its content cleanly, while preserving the human judgment and voice that subscribers actually pay for.
• James Murdoch buys half of Vox Media. The $300 million deal includes New York Magazine and Vox Media Podcasts — the latter considered one of the company’s most valuable assets thanks to star hosts like technology journalist Kara Swisher, who supported the deal, saying: “I always thought James had great instincts on the digital business, but then Rupert would always come in and f**k it up.”
• Fierce Publications sold in $1.5b deal.  Apollo Funds agreed to acquire Questex, publisher of Fierce Pharma, Fierce Biotech, Fierce Healthcare and Fierce CRO.
• ABC claims government overreach threatens press freedom. In the most aggressive defense yet from a broadcast network, ABC filed with the FCC accusing regulators of a “chilling effect” on free speech by targeting political content they disagreed with — specifically the talk show The View.
• Business Insider announces cuts. Less than 5% of global newsroom staff will be affected as the organization seeks to focus on areas that drive more readership.
• NPR trims. The public broadcaster is restructuring its newsroom as it must close an $8 million shortfall in its $300 million annual budget following the elimination of federal subsidies for its member stations, offering buyouts to 300 employees. NPR CEO Katherine Maher said the network projects a $15 million decline in station fees this year and expects corporate sponsorship revenue to fall as well.
• Bloomberg expands to books. A forthcoming newsletter, On Books, will feature weekly reviews and recommendations to “expand your thinking.”

Media moves

• Fortune has hired Sebastian Herrera (formerly The Wall Street Journal) as a technology correspondent. The organization also hired Aaron Andrews (formerly Forbes) as senior director partnerships.
• Dhruv Mehrotra is returning to WIRED after several years at Bloomberg.
• Forbes hired careers writer Courtney Connley-Hampton, education writer Lisa Chambers and small business writer John Schroyer.
• Brianna Abbott (formerly The Wall Street Journal) is going freelance full-time as a health reporter.
• The Financial Times named Chris Johnston (formerly Business Insider) its Asia companies and markets news editor.
• Mark Wilson is leaving Fast Company after 15 years. He will be joining the design team at Hark as Lead Writer.
• Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng announced she is leaving the organization by the end of June to pursue a more tech-oriented position.
• Matt Phillips returned to Axios as a markets correspondent and co-author of the Axios Markets newsletter after a stint at Sherwood News.

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