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Good morning. Good afternoon. Welcome, listeners. Welcome to the New Shape Of Work podcast. Really excited to have this session today and very timely. As many of you well know May is mental health month. And I wanted to bring you a speaker this month that I first heard speak last year. And he really got me thinking about what is the trajectory we are on with regard to the well-being of our workers? What does that mean for me, as parents who have young people entering the workplace? And what does that mean for me as a manager of workers, having some of these experiences?

Is one of those sessions that really lingered in my mind. And so I hope today it will have the same impact on you and inspire you to think a little bit more deeper about this topic and how well prepared we are in the workplaces of today to welcome the workforce of tomorrow. I think that rising incidences of mental health challenges are just going up and up. I did global talent trends every year, research at Mercer, we see the proportion of employees feeling close to burnout just keeps getting higher and higher.

And then we've also just got concerns around the rising cost of health and well-being. So there's a lot of topics that many of our listeners are grappling with related to this. But today we're going to take a slightly different slant on it. I'm going to be chatting with Dr. Andrew Tay, chief well-being officer, at the National University of Singapore. And I'm excited to have you on, Andrew, for two reasons. [LAUGHS] One, the fact that your role has got chief status, which I think is very, very relevant to actually making traction on this topic.

And second, the fact that you get to work up close and personal with the next generation of talent. In those MBA master's programs, they literally leave your premises and walk into hours. So I can't think of anyone, [LAUGHS] anyone better to give us a glimpse on the future. Andrew, thank you for agreeing to be on the podcast and welcome today.

Thank you Kate. Thank you for having me. And really, really happy to be here to talk about well-being, the topic of well-being. Which is so close to all of our hearts. I'm so glad to explain to you how we even got this chief well-being officer role.

Yeah, well, why don't we even start there, because-- well, one, I'd love to hear a little bit about you and your journey, because I do think that there's reasons why you were able to get the chief role off the ground. So maybe a little bit of that. And then yes, how did you get such an important role, with that title, and why did you feel that was important for you to be able to gain traction?

Thank you for that question, Kate. A quick introduction of myself is that I'm a medical doctor by training. And I went on to do a bit of a specialization known as the occupational health, also known as the occupational medicine. It is a cousin or a sibling of what we are more familiar with the topic of a public health. So which means you'll find these public health practitioners working in the government. And they will be advising the public to say, exercise more, sleep more, eat healthy. But you'll find that such messages tend not to be as powerful as from a workplace perspective.

Now, occupational health comes from the lens of an organization as an environment, and the captive audience would be the employees. So with that in mind, if we have the chance, I will say for example, tweaking the ways of working in the workplace or even tweaking the HR policy, everybody actually benefited in real time. And also during their most productive hours. So the health of the population can be improved, if we were to improve the well-being of our employees in the workplace. So I find that to be a fascinating approach of improving population health, and that's why I got into occupational medicine and occupational health. Yeah.

Interesting. Interesting. And you're so right. I mean, I wake up with those munchies of right. I need to eat healthily, sleep more, exercise more. But they don't really change my habits day to day. And we spend such a large part of our lives at work. If you want to have an impact on the population, this is where you've got to be. So when did the chief well-being officer role get established, and what sort of drove that?

Yeah, so this is an interesting question that people ask me. So what does a chief well-being officer do, right? Do I sleep the most? Do I exercise the most? Do I eat healthily? The answer is it depends. [LAUGHTER] But I think I do have to set a good example because of what the title is illustrating, and I'm representing my organization. But I'm coming back to the role of the chief well-being officer, I think the better title is known as the chief negotiating officer, because at the end of it all, what needs to be done is that well-being is a whole of organization approach.

It is not a HR problem. It is not a manager problem. It's not a CEO problem, but everybody's problem. Everybody has a role to play. So my role is to negotiate with every stakeholders. That includes HR. And we also need to understand that even in the function of HR, there's HR business partner, there's HR common band colleagues. And there's also HR learning, and transformation, and development. So all of them helps to create an ecosystem that helps facilitate the application of well-being in everyday setting.

Now, in the context of NUS, the chief well-being officer was established under the Office of the President. As you can see over here. It was meant to demonstrate tangibly that the university is very committed to the well-being of our staff and onto our students. It also gives me a lot more power, gravitas to drive changes, because I'm representing the Office of the President so that I can get my stakeholders to meet and be aligned in some of the initiatives. But that doesn't mean that I go in to strong arm people. I believe what we need to do is to get onto the conversation, and I believe the outcome is the same, which is a more engaged workforce, better productivity, and eventually a healthier workforce.

Gratefully. Driving up productivity, improving our engagement scores are very much home ground for many of our listeners. And I love that point about chief negotiating officer. I mean, you're absolutely right. You can't solve it within any individual function if you're buried under a part of HR, it's going to be quite hard to have the impact that you want. And I think in organizations, we have exactly the same challenge that we need to solve.

I mentioned earlier that we got a chance to connect to the great conference last year, that we were both speakers. And you got up on stage and said, I don't want any of you take any photos, but I'm going to share some stats. And you shared stats about our workforce that you've been tracking year over year. And you said, that's why I want to be in front of you as a group of HR people, because this is the talent you're inheriting this year. And honestly, it was silence in the room and everyone was talking about it in the breaks. [LAUGHS]

And I think everyone was quite surprised also just how diverse the talent is, because although you're based in Singapore, your talent pool are coming from the best schools all around the world. So it is a multicultural challenge. And then they go back to around the world. Maybe you could share a little bit about what were those stats. I know you don't want to share the figures, but just the picture it was painting. Why you felt it was so important to speak to HR, and what the implications? And I don't know if any of those stats have changed over the last year.

Oh, yeah. Probably I'll just share a little bit in terms of-- let me start off with why it is important for HR to be engaged, to talk on the topic of workforce well-being especially, we are training the next batch of our workforce who will be entering into your workplace. It is important for HR to anticipate the kind of issues that the young people are facing before they enter the workforce, and the kind of support that can help them in thriving in their respective roles.

For example, the students in NUS have gotten used to the idea of a coaching service provision to deepen their skills. This can help HR to be more aware of such trends and consider allocating budget for coaching services on top of the traditional EAP counseling services, because the traditional counseling services may not be suitable to help employees on skills related anxiety such as procrastination, time management, executive presence or even doing presentation. Now, these are not mental health challenges, but they are skills-based related anxiety. And sometimes providing coaching may be more appropriate. So it helps HR to plan for the type of services that will help the next generation of workforce.

Secondly, it is also important for HR to be aware of the way that student learning has evolved and how it is delivered. Currently it is much more experiential and with greater emphasis on this concept of student life. Oh, did I show that when students are consume, when they consume their learning, through remote learning environment, the risk of them developing self-esteem issues actually increases as they interact with one another through computer platform. So this has an impact in the design of remote working policies or work-in office arrangements.

If you emphasize more on the work-in office arrangement, it actually allows for the working community to connect socially, have water cooler talks or corridor conversation. Such informal interactions actually improve goodwill and collaboration. It actually improves connectivity and reduces isolation as well.

Wow, interesting. So many of us around the world have been tasked with writing, our return to office policies or hybrid working. I think having some of your researchers to, look we have seen that the cohorts that are fully remote, have more of these self-esteem issues than those who are in a more blended. That those type of real fact-driven insights, I think are really, really valuable. I also found that interesting your point about some of the anxiety that people feel is actually skills-based, prioritization, executive presence, presentation skills.

I hadn't really thought about that. But in the world that we are today and you and I are on a video together, yeah you need to be a lot more comfortable with some of that stuff, and you need to be a lot more self-organized in the world we are today. So I could see how they would have a bigger impact than maybe 10 years ago.

Yeah, that's true. Also, looking at us through the computer platform, right now, you have the camera on yourself. And just before we started this recording, we were talking about, how do we look on the camera. And there is a great tendency for us to keep looking at ourselves, wondering if I have this haircut or if I should have put on this makeup, or maybe I should have put on start-on some braces to help in straightening my teeth. So this has a subtle impact in terms of our self-esteem.

And we saw actually the stock market of some of these aesthetic related companies actually skyrocketed during the time of a COVID, because they are more self aware of their presence and their presentations on the computer platform. So with this in mind, we have to be very, very careful in terms of how we are designing the way that we work, because it has an impact on how it affects the well-being of the person.

Yeah, absolutely. And I do feel that there's an assumption that we're all quite comfortable to jump on. I mean, this is meant to be an audio today, and we said, oh, let's do the visual as well. But yeah, not everybody feels comfortable in doing that. I actually turned off my video, so I don't look at myself, but that's probably to do with my age. [LAUGHTER] But Andrew, what I found quite interesting about your research is you also said, saw that during the COVID years, some of those more insecurities came up and you could actually track them in your data, what type of mental health problems people were having?

And do some really interesting correlates back to what's happening in the world. And I was just fascinated, how much does the way in which we organize our work environments, our learning environments, was having a direct impact on what type of mental health problems people were having?

Yes.

As you look at the most recent data that you have, is there anything that's emerging now that you think is new or new challenges that we need to be aware of?

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about some of the trends that we saw during the COVID years. So in 2021 and 2022, the top diagnoses or the top reasons for why students come to seek counseling help was actually on self-esteem and self-image. So how they look like and how they consume the world. Though, because the way that they consume the world at that point of time, it will lockdown was through social media. And social media therefore gave a form of reality that is not really real, but that to them is the way that they view the world. How they look.

So and if they find themselves not looking like how the social media is portraying a human is behaving, talking, interacting, or even looking like. It has an impact on their self-esteem, because they feel like they are not there, or they are not ready. Fast forward, to 2023 and 2024, when we have all the students back into the campus, we place a lot more emphasis on student life. We place a lot more emphasis on student interactions and on site orientations, no longer electronic online orientation.

We started to see that the diagnosis or the reasons for encounter regarding personal image is now no longer top three in the reasons for encounter. So it's quite fascinating. And it shows us that if we focus too much on remote working, it does play a huge role in terms of how our well-being is going to be like for our population.

And anything else that's creeping up today. Any, when you think about those top three mental health challenges today, anything that we need to be aware of as we welcome these people into our workforces?

I would say looking at our data over here, the students in NUS are technically very strong. They're highly motivated. So the top three, one of the top three reasons for encounter right now is academic stress. So the stress due to the academic rigor, many of them find that, they cannot settle for B, they need to go for A. And unfortunately, in almost all academic institutions, there will be some form of bell curve grading and which means that some people definitely will get B.

And if that happens to some of our students, if they find it hard to accept, and, of course, it increases the competitiveness among our students. And that has a huge strain on the mental well-being of our students. We try very hard to pivot away from such pursuit of scores by injecting more student life focus and curriculum.

And for the first time, we have embarked on this, what we known as the NUS1 curriculum. And that is to expose our students towards something that's more generic in terms of education. And it also includes things how do you manage yourself and be more aware of your emotions and your own well-being and self-care too. So these are some of the ways that we want to improve the well-being of our students through equipping them with some of the self-care skill sets.

Well, we'll get on to some of the solutions that you see really has traction with young workers. And I say young workers, because these are people doing masters and MBAs. They really are entering the workforce straight away. But listening to you the, I see some parallels with our performance management system. One of the challenges many clients say to us is the drift to the right, because they want to reward effort. And because people get so devastating when they're not seen as a standout year after year, it ends up being very challenging then to link it to the reward system because of the affordability issues. And just handling those conversations, has been really tough for managers.

But I wouldn't mind just picking your brains on this relentless pace we have going on at the moment around productivity. We are wanting to see more and more every year. We have many more increased digital ways of working. And what impact do you think this will have on our young people long term?

Yeah. So my advice is for the employees, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, to be very careful of overly pivoting to remote working, because this can actually slow down decision making process and also productivity. You really want your people to be together, to connect together. So do spend time in some of the team bonding activities. To help break the ice, facilitate some form of organic conversation. Organic relationship. This really helps to build up goodwill. And once goodwill has been formed, you find that the collaboration, the speed of decision making actually increases a lot.

The second item is the self-care. I am very concerned, and of course, we are very concerned about how our Asian colleagues, or rather colleagues working in Asia-Pacific, they tend to straddle between the time zones of our US and the UK colleagues. And many times if you have a time zone, if you have a meeting across the three time zone of Asia-Pacific, the EMEA, UK, and the US, our colleagues in Asia-Pacific usually are the ones that will dial in after office hours at about 11:00 PM or 12:00 midnight.

And that blurring of your work life boundary can really have a crippling impact on the person's wee-being. And when you have chronic sleep deprivation, it actually can show up in the medical claims in the long run, in terms of a higher risk of getting diabetes and hypertension and even subtle increase in your cancer risk. So all this eventually will come back and haunt you in other ways. So self-care is really, really important, but also setting a healthy ways of working as a working culture among, in the workplace, is really, really important to help protect one another and so that we can really take the time to recover and be more resilient.

That really rests with managers, doesn't it? Because I spent 10 years working out of Hong Kong in a global role for a US [LAUGHS] headquartered business. And you're right, that 11:00 to 12:00 PM, it gets tough, particularly if you're the more minority participants. And there are more people--

That's right.

--in the US and the UK. But it's interesting to hear you talk about the impact that can have, which still comes back to our budgets and the sustainability of our work cultures. So we do need to think about it. And probably it's the people not in the role but the people managing the role that need to be proactive about that. What are some of the other things that you have done? I mean, you've actually given us some really great suggestions already. I love the ones earlier around skills-based anxiety. What are the things we might need to train young people on, the link with remote working and self-esteem issues and how to much of that can slow down decision making, how we've got to mitigate that, and now self-care?

Any other programs that you're particularly proud of that you think have penetrated and had an impact? And I know that you're very close to the data. [LAUGHTER] So you know what has impact and doesn't have impact. I mean, you just do these amazing experiments. Is there anything else that you can share with our listeners today that they could think about bringing into their firms?

Yeah so we are starting off 2024, which was last year. We have started to track the concept of the instability. So the concept of instability is similar to the concept of passive aggressiveness. How we measure two items. One, do you experience passive aggressiveness in the workplace. Number two, how much does your department tolerate passive aggressiveness as a working culture. And it is yielding fascinating insights regarding the experience of incivility or passive aggressiveness in the workplace.

We found that in departments that have lesser experience of incivility, there are 26% more likely to have employees not taking medical leave. So that has an impact on your actual productivity, which means that people really turn out. So your 26% more likely to have your employees are not taking medical leave and show up for work and they are happier. Also, we also found that in departments that have got lower scores on instability, which means that they not experience healthy environment. There are 3.9 times, or 392% more likely to have a higher psychological safety score too.

And that's exactly what you want, because the Google Aristotle Project has mentioned the importance of having strong psychological safety for the most effective team. So what does that mean? It means manage your behavior. You need to manage the behavior of your colleagues. You can not tolerate rude gesture. You can not tolerate remarks that were aimed at hurting people.

Now, the thing about passive aggressiveness is that it is masked in certain words. It is bubble wrapped. But when it's delivered to the person, some people felt very uncomfortable in the process. They, do they feel insulted? But the thing about passive aggressiveness is that because it is not so obvious, the person or the perpetrator tried to get away with it, and say things like, I think you are too sensitive. No, that wasn't what I meant.

Well, the meeting has ended. I don't think I meant it that way, but let's just move on, shall we? And so that's what passive aggressive is about. You try to get away with it after you land your punches. And that's something I think we need to call out in our meetings. And I think leaders need to start first by saying that, hey, this is OK. This is not OK. And I want to call out that action.

Perhaps, you are trying to make a point this way, but it landed across as very rude. And I want you to apologize at this point in time. So if our leaders are able to call out such behavior in a meeting openly, immediately the psychological safety is felt among the team members. So I would like our leaders out there, to really start practicing that. And you can see that your engagement score will actually improve.

It's really interesting, because you're right, it's such an intangible, it's hard to measure. And so many times in engagement surveys, a lot of those things around values, diversity, and inclusion get really high scores, because people will, of course, we believe in that. But it's not about whether you believe in it. It's about how do you feel, and do you feel included. And, I love that question there about how much does your department tolerate passive aggressive? There's lots of permissions to answer that. [LAUGHTER]

So you would get a more accurate read on it. But, I'm sitting here and hearing you be pretty assertive around this is the behavior we will tolerate. And this is what we want. And I don't see so much of that in the workplaces today. But I think it could have a tremendous impact, on all the things you brought up earlier, the willingness to collaborate, speak openly, self-esteem issues, and just speed of decision making. If we have that incivility there, it's all going to have an impact and spin out business outcomes. Really, really interesting.

That's right. That's right.

We are coming to the end of our time together, unfortunately. I'm sure there's probably a few people listening in saying, why don't we have a chief well-being officer. There's enough writing on the wall about how our workforce is feeling. And there's a lot-- there's enough financial ramifications if we get this wrong. When we look at our health spend, our well-being spend, the rising incidences of non-communicable diseases and all of that you brought up, what would be your advice for them in getting something like that off the ground, or chief negotiating officer, as you called it? Because I do think that as we start to push harder and harder on transformation, we have more human machine teaming. Some of these issues, if unaddressed, are going to get bigger.

Yeah. So the first thing to think about when you want to set up the well-being expertise in the workforce, is to think about the structure. So my opening questions to the audience has always been, if you have the chance to set up a health and well-being unit or expertise, where will you house that expertise? Would you house it under HR? If you want to house it under HR, would you put it under benefits or would you put it under learning and development, or would you put it under organizational development?

In the context of Australia, you will find that they tend to house it under health and safety. And that's because employee well-being is regulated under the Health and Safety Regulations. So you find that is housed under there. But where your house this health and well-being expertise will generate pros and cons. And then there are limitations also towards the role. So for example, if you house it under benefits which a lot of organizations are doing, then the place where you tend to have an influence on will be on your insurance, your EAP design. But if you want to talk about culture, ways of working, then you realize that, oh, you need to work with your L&D colleagues, or even your people management training curriculum.

And if your L&D colleagues were to tell you that, sorry, that is not my priority, then you realize that you're stuck somewhere. So in order to make sure that everybody is aligned and understand that well-being is a collective goal, what needs to be done then is to understand where in the structure would you want to put in the health and well-being expertise. In the context of NUS, we intentionally house it in the Office of the President, because we know that it is the whole of organization approach.

Secondly, what you can do is then to chair a committee consisting of a variety of a stakeholders from HR, campus infrastructure, health and safety, and even people managers, and leaders to come in and talk about what is their own individual role as a people manager, as a health and safety practitioner, from a HR perspective. How can we actually tackle and approach health and well-being from a systematic lens.

Now, the third item is to develop a systematic approach. One of the approach that we have developed is known as a WellNUS Framework. Or you can try to google WellNUS framework and you'll be able to-- you'll be led to our website. And you'll find that framework is very, very simple and intuitive to approach to systematically identify what are the gaps that an organization may have. And you use that to prioritize the initiatives that you want to engage in. Lastly, engage consultants from time to time. I know that Mercer has got health solutions team. We also have health solutions team. So from time to time, just have a conversation with some of these practitioners and you'll be able to get insights.

Well, Dr. Andrew Tay, thank you so much for your thoughts and comments today. You've again left me thinking about just how important that we do put this not just on the agenda, but in the right place in the organization. I have again learned more. Particularly around some of those skills. I hadn't really thought of that linkage there. And I think there's, an onus on us within organizations to fulfill those gaps and make sure that we've got good policies around time zones showing up to work and where we intentionally do or do not use our remote working.

And being absolutely fascinating, and thank you for sharing those resources that you have as well. I think I certainly will be poking my nose in on that. Listeners, if you've enjoyed today's podcast and you want to dive into these issues more, we've got some articles on how do you build psychological safety at work on the website. Andrew, you already mentioned we have a great health and benefits team, and we're really passionate about sharing our research and insights into this important area. Andrew, thank you so much for your time again today. And everybody, thank you for tuning in. Have a good rest of the day, everyone. Bye bye.

Goodbye

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