Tick Box or People

Workplace menopause support: tick box, or people,

By Rhu Strand, Functional Wellness Practitioner and Workplace Wellness Consultant - September 2026

What a good workplace menopause ethos actually looks like

Imagine you are an employee, any employee, at any level, and menopause has started showing up in your working life. What would a genuinely good employer actually give you? Not a policy document. Not a session that happened once. What would it feel like, day to day, to work somewhere that had got this right?

I think it comes down to a handful of things.

You would know who to go to, and trust it

A good workplace does not just deliver training and hope the message lands somewhere useful. It makes sure every employee, whatever their role, knows exactly who they can speak to, and has real reason to trust that speaking up will help rather than be quietly noted somewhere. Knowing a session happened is not the same as knowing what to do when you actually need support.

Talking to your manager would feel easy, not risky

Your line manager is naturally your first point of contact, that is simply how a business works day to day. What makes that conversation easy rather than awkward is knowing you have both had the same grounding. Your manager, whether that is a man or a woman, has had training in how to listen, and you understand your own hormones. When both sides are working from the same understanding, asking for what you need stops feeling like a risk and just becomes a normal conversation at work.

Menopause would not check your job title first

A cleaner's oestrogen does exactly the same unpredictable thing a chief executive's does. Neither of them chose their hormones based on their position in the business. A genuinely good employer gives every woman the same depth of support and the same confidence to speak, regardless of where she sits on the org chart. Not a thorough version for senior staff and a thinner, secondhand version for everyone else.

The legislation would be used the right way round

The new legislation pushing employers to take menopause seriously is a good thing, and it is overdue. But there is a risk sitting inside it too. In a business that is more focused on liability than people, awareness could get read the wrong way, becoming a quiet reason to think twice about hiring or promoting a woman of a certain age, rather than a reason to support her properly. A good employer uses the legislation as it was intended, as a floor to build support on, not a risk to manage around.

It would be genuinely felt, not just delivered

This is not hypothetical. The Menopause Friendly Employer Awards, run by Henpicked and supported by the CIPD, already judge things like most open workplace and best training initiative as entirely separate categories from whether a company simply ran a session. The businesses that do this well are not hard to spot, because it does not feel like a tick box exercise to the people working there. It feels like being genuinely cared for.

Tick box, or people

I keep coming back to this question when I think about what good workplace support should look like. Is a business thinking about the person, or is it thinking about its own risk register? It has to be both, a business does need to think about itself too. But when those two things pull in different directions, which one wins tells you everything about what kind of employer someone is actually working for.

Every woman in a business deserves the same depth of support and the same confidence to speak, whether she is running the place or cleaning it at the end of the day. That is not a criticism of any one employer. It is simply the standard worth aiming for.

Rhu x