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This paper aims to focus on the process of organisational change in the implementation of recovery principles into everyday NHS mental health practice, in order to highlight the centrality of this process in enabling implementation.

Several recent good practice examples are given below of relevant projects in which similar challenges have been met and the methods of doing so.

The organisational change process for recovery‐oriented services needs to be a win‐win situation, in which all of the participants would be able to recognise that each of them can win from the implementation of a recovery‐oriented service, even if they are in for some losses (in status, in having to share power, being indirectly criticised for the way they have worked up to now, having to unlearn). This implies that the losses need to be recognised by the leaders of the change process and addressed as much as possible, but that the emphasis should remain on what the participants stand to gain in the new culture and structure.

Conceptual framework of such a process and its significant components are linked to the challenges inherent in recovery implementation for the workforce. The challenges are expanded upon in terms of their implications for the specificity of the organisational change required and its complexity. Organisational change is both differentiated from the change in the content and structure of services necessary for implementing recovery yet related to it.

This article relates one aspect of an action research project on work related stress and mental health problems to its wider context. It is argued that self‐help/mutual aid, including self‐management, could make an important contribution to tackling the current epidemic of work‐related stress in the UK and elsewhere. Initiatives such as the government's Work‐Life Balance campaign indicate that the policy context is appropriate. An overview of the causes, costs of, and policy responses to work‐related stress is followed by a discussion on the nature of self‐help/mutual aid and the benefits that the sharing of experiential knowledge can bring to participants. This includes a specific, structured form of self‐help: self‐management programmes as led and used by mental health user groups. We conclude that self‐help initiatives can make a valuable contribution to addressing work‐related stress if employers support them. Beyond simply ameliorating staff retention problems, the experiential learning communities that could be created could be an asset, particularly in seeking to change workplace cultures to minimise work‐related mental stresses.

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