Research paper · RP45

Train the Manager, Move the Team

Gayed and colleagues asked, in 2018, whether training workplace managers changed anything that employees could feel. Manager knowledge moved (SMD 0.73). Employee psychological symptoms did not: SMD −0.08 (95 per cent CI −0.21 to 0.06; p = 0.28; I² = 0 per cent). A new pooled Hedges g for employee outcomes is not yet possible: six independent controlled programmes from 2010 to 2026 measured different employee constructs, two were pilots, and comparable wellbeing or distress estimates number fewer than five. The last official pooled figure that includes later trials is the World Health Organization 2022 update of Gayed: standardised mean difference −0.15 (95 per cent CI −0.29 to −0.02) across six randomised trials, high certainty in the WHO text, most of them older than our year window. Our 2010–2026 living update finds one Australian cluster trial in which a four-hour face-to-face programme reduced work-related sick leave by 6.45 hours per employee over six months; one Canadian wait-list trial in which employees of trained managers used more workplace resources; and a consistent null or trivial signal on employee wellbeing scales in British and Australian trials. Employee-rated manager support leans positive when it is measured. Certainty of evidence for every employee-level domain is low by GRADE. No Indian randomised trial of workplace manager mental-health training with employee outcomes was found on CTRI or in the international databases. For an Indian workplace programme the honest reading is this: train the manager as a high-leverage practice, measure the team, and do not advertise a wellbeing effect the trials have not yet earned. The manager is the fine-tuning layer. The team is the held-out test set. Until Indian trials exist, the test set is still overseas.