The first place your people turn. Before it becomes a case.

Seen as weather, never as names.

You already pay for support, and almost nobody uses it. Fewer than one in ten of your people will open the assistance programme this year, and only around a quarter know it exists. Meanwhile the cost isn't in the empty chairs. Poor mental health costs UK employers around fifty-one billion pounds a year, and the largest part of it, some twenty-four billion, is people who turn up and can't work. They are at their desks, they are quiet, and nothing you've bought reaches them.

The reason is trust, and it is going the wrong way: among people under twenty-five, willingness to raise mental health with a manager fell from three in four to just over half in a single year. The first question anyone asks of support at work is "who will see this?" Here the answer is no one. That is why people open it, and why it works as the front line: the thing someone turns to at eleven at night, weeks before they'd call a helpline and long before it becomes a case.

What every person gets

• A companion that learns them by talking, not by a form, and is there at two in the morning as well as two in the afternoon.
• Their own record. Everything it keeps, in one place they can read, argue with, and take with them if they leave.
• A person when it matters. If what they write sounds like a crisis, it stops and points them to a human. Nobody is left with a chatbot at the worst moment.
• Small shared moments the team can opt into, so a group of colleagues becomes a room that notices each other.

What leaders get: the weather, early

Not the diary. The honest read on how the organisation is doing, given the only way it can be given without breaking trust: as a count. How many are using it. How many came back. Which weeks turned, and for which part of the room. Early enough to act, weeks before absence figures and exit interviews tell you the same thing late.

Why people trust it, and why that is the product

Usage is a trust number. People open support when they are certain it can't be used on them, so the guarantees aren't the small print. They are the reason the usage is high.

• You see counts, and only when the group is large enough that no one can be picked out. Below that, nothing.
• Each person chooses which counts they're part of, and can change their mind.
• No scores, no flags, no reports on individuals.
• Reading emotion from what people write at work is now unlawful in some jurisdictions and unwelcome in all of them. Here it isn't a setting that's turned off. It was never built.

Where it fits

In front of what you have, not instead of it. Your assistance programme and occupational health stay in place. This is what people reach for first, so that fewer reach the others too late.

How it starts

Four weeks with one team, at the per-person rate. At the end you get that team's weather and a straight conversation. The measure is simple: of the people who started, how many are still choosing to come back in the fourth week. If it's fewer than one in three, the pilot is on us. No set-up fee, no dashboards to buy, no minimum term afterwards.

Write to hello@innerfrontier.uk