62% of companies already offer psychological support, but most invest without knowing what is happening to their staff. Absences due to mental health have increased by 111% in five years, costing €59.109 billion.
62% of Spanish companies now offer psychological support programmes to their employees, compared to 41% a year earlier. However, most decide where to invest without knowing the real causes that lead their staff to take sick leave. This is highlighted in an analysis by Wonest, a company specialised in reducing the impact of employees' personal situations on business results, as reported by rrhhpress.com.
The data managed by the company, which has 24 years of experience and covers more than 870,000 employees and family members in Spain, Portugal, Colombia, Peru, and Panama, paints a complex picture: sick leave due to mental health has increased by 111% in five years, and absenteeism reached 7.6% of agreed hours in Spain in 2025, costing €59.109 billion.
The first question that every HR department should be able to answer is what the causes behind the absences are. According to Wonest, there is almost never just one cause. Medical leave accounts for nearly 78% of absenteeism, but a study by Adecco involving over 3,000 workers attributes 70% of it to personal, family, or emotional situations.
Stress is the issue that generates the least absence hours as an isolated cause, costing around €12.6 million a year, less than child-rearing or caring for elderly relatives. However, it is the most widespread: it affects one in four employees. The reason is that stress permeates all other situations and rarely appears as the main cause.
Behind every worker, there is a family. On average, nearly four people depend on each employee, and one in two is responsible for a dependent family member. Moreover, more than half of psychology consultations are not for the employee but for their partner or children.
In company exits, a similar trend occurs. 31% are recorded for family reasons, and only 4% for workload. However, in comments, overload and stress also appear behind exits attributed to family, salary, or professional development.
The second question is whether the company detects changes before they turn into absenteeism or turnover. The signs exist and can be measured. In the analysed exit interviews, 77% of respondents had been thinking about leaving for more than a month, and 44% for more than three. More than a third had not communicated this to their manager.
Wonest evaluates the level of stress in workplaces several times a year and observes a clear relationship: when stress rises, employees' willingness to recommend their company as a workplace (eNPS) falls. The correlation between these two indicators is 0.79. There are centres that have gone from a good situation to a critical one in less than a year, so annual measurement would be too late.
The risk is concentrated where help reaches the least. Groups with the worst health and stress indicators are also those who value their company's value proposition the least and are most likely to leave. They often coincide with those who have the least access to the resources offered by the company.
Arriving late has a cost: an unplanned absence can cost up to three times more than a planned one, in addition to replacements, team overload, and presenteeism. The legal framework is also tightening. The draft reform of the Occupational Risk Prevention Law, approved on April 28, 2026 and now in parliamentary processing, plans to include psychosocial risks in preventive evaluations and extend health monitoring to the mental dimension.
The third question is whether the staff is satisfied with the measures offered to them. Often the answer is no, and not due to a lack of offerings or budget. Wonest frequently detects this in companies that have implemented programmes without first consulting their workers.
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