How to ask your IT team what support they need
World Mental Health Day (October 10, 2026) is a reminder of the value of first-hand experience. This year's WHO campaign centers on people who have lived through mental health difficulties themselves: their voice should shape the support that's offered to them. There's a practical lesson for a company here too: if you want to improve working conditions, start by talking to the people working in them.
That doesn't mean asking your team to talk about their health. A leader can simply ask what gets in the way of their everyday work, and what change would actually help.
Ask about the work, not for a diagnosis
In an IT team, strain rarely comes down to one hard task. It can build up as a deployment deadline approaches and a developer is interrupted every hour by another urgent message. It can come from an on-call shift that ends in an incident, followed the next morning by a regular workday as if nothing happened. Or from technical debt, where a small change needs a string of careful workarounds.
These are examples worth checking against your own team, not a ready-made list of causes for every company. WHO points out that heavy workloads, long hours, and little control over how tasks get done can be risk factors for mental health. The same publication estimates that depression and anxiety cost the world around 12 billion working days a year. That's a global figure, not a statistic specific to IT or to any one team.
So the question "Is everyone doing okay?" won't give you much to act on. A better opening is:
> "What's made it hardest to get your work done calmly over the past few weeks? What could we change about how work is organized to make that easier?"
A question like this lets people talk about work without disclosing anything private. It also gives a leader something concrete to work with: deadlines, how often people get interrupted, on-call rules, the scope of responsibilities, or access to support.
Pick a setting where it's easy to answer honestly
In a one-on-one, you can ask about a specific person's workload: "Which task is taking the most out of you right now?" and "What decision or help do you need from me?" It helps to explain why you're asking, and leave room for an answer. A moment of silence is better than offering your own diagnosis.
A retrospective works well when the issue is about how the whole team works. You can ask people to name one thing that got in the way during the last sprint, and one change worth trying in the next one. If people are reluctant to speak up in front of a manager, a short anonymous survey can be an easier starting point. In a small team, though, be upfront that details in an answer may still make it possible to guess who wrote it.
The UK's Health and Safety Executive recommends talking with employees as a way to identify sources of stress and possible solutions. It also notes this isn't a standalone measure: the risks it uncovers still need to be addressed.
Ask follow-up questions before proposing a fix
Say the same line keeps coming up in the answers: "Too many meetings." Cutting every meeting short might help, but you don't yet know whether the real issue is how many there are, an unclear purpose, or the way they break up focus time. Ask: "Which meetings are actually necessary, and which ones could just as easily be a short written update?"
The same goes for on-call shifts. "On-call is exhausting" could mean too many alerts, no backup coverage, or a rough return to work after a night-time incident. Don't guess. Ask the team to describe the situation and suggest a change you could try.
Not every answer will be about process. If someone brings up their own health, listen without judging and without expecting details. Work out what support they need at work and who at the company they can turn to in confidence. A conversation with a manager is not a medical consultation.
Come back with a decision, even a small one
Once you've gathered the answers, summarize them without attributing anything to a specific person: "We're hearing that the hardest part is urgent tasks landing out of nowhere while we're mid-deployment." Then pick one change, name who's responsible for it, and set a date to check how it went.
For example: for two weeks, new urgent tasks go to the team lead first, who sets their priority and decides what can wait. After that, the team reviews whether interruptions actually dropped and whether the rule delayed anything important. If the idea doesn't work, adjust it. If the problem needs a bigger decision, say who will make it and when you'll come back with an answer.
The International Labour Organization lists employee involvement in decision-making among the ways to prevent psychosocial risks. In practice, that means more than just collecting opinions: people should see what their input actually changed.
One thing worth remembering
The most useful question about support points at a specific obstacle in the work. Ask it somewhere people can answer freely, then come back with one visible change. That's where a credible conversation about team wellbeing starts.