Ensuring Emotional and Mental Health Wellness at Workplaces

7 Dr Wan Rizal asked the Minister for Manpower what measures the Ministry has taken in ensuring emotional and mental health wellness in workplaces.

The Senior Minister of State for Manpower (Mr Zaqy Mohamad) (for the Minister for Manpower): Mr Speaker, MOM has been working closely with the social and health agencies, tripartite partners and other stakeholders to provide greater support for mental wellness at the workplace.

We released an advisory on supporting mental well-being of workers under COVID-19 work arrangements in April this year. We will be releasing a Tripartite Advisory on Workers’ Mental Well-being later this year. The Tripartite Advisory will provide practical guidance to employers on good workplace practices to promote workers’ mental well-being.

There are existing programmes and resources that employers can tap on to help them implement mental wellness programmes at the workplace. For instance, HPB provides Management Training workshops to equip managers and HR professionals with knowledge and skills to be supportive leaders at the workplace. Companies can also tap on HPB's Workplace Outreach Wellness or WOW Package to co-fund and implement health promotion programmes, such as mental wellness workshops for their staff. To date, about 37,000 working adults have benefited from HPB's mental wellness programmes. There is also the iWorkHealth online self-assessment tool developed by MOM, IMH, HPB, Workplace Safety and Health Council and CGH to help companies identify common workplace stressors. The tool is currently piloted by a group of companies and will be fully rolled out next year, that is, 2021.

There are also many community resources in place to support individual workers who need emotional and psychological help. Various agencies, such as NCSS, the Agency for Integrated Care or AIC, and MSF work with social service agencies to provide services, such as counselling and mental health resources. For example, NCSS funds the Singapore Anglican Community Services to provide training and advisory support to employers and co-workers in creating an inclusive and supportive work environment.

NCSS also organises a multi-year public education campaign called Beyond the Label to address stigma faced by persons living with mental health conditions in Singapore. This year's campaign encourages working adults who are affected by mental health distress to seek mental health support early.

We are also encouraged to note that companies have stepped forward to take action in promoting workplace mental health. For instance, the WorkWell Leaders network organises regular meetings among corporate leaders to discuss ways to improve workplace mental health. NCSS also has a Peer Support Specialist Programme that trains individuals who have recovered from mental health issues as Peer Support Specialists to support others in their recovery.

MOM will continue to work with our partners to educate and gain the support of employers to further promote workers' mental well-being at the workplace.

Mr Speaker: Dr Wan Rizal.

Dr Wan Rizal (Jalan Besar): I thank the Senior Minister of State for the reply. I am certainly heartened by the measures and programmes that are available for mental health at the workplaces. So, my question will be, will these progammes and measures be made mandatory across all workplaces. And my second is, if these programmes are in place, will MOM conduct regular studies on the efficacy of the programmes so that we can better understand and use these programmes to help our workers?

Mr Zaqy Mohamad: I thank the Member for his questions. I think it relates to two parts. First, whether these programmes will be made mandatory. We are promoting and taking a very promotional approach to mental health awareness amongst employers. We are taking good steps, especially with the new advisory that we are putting out later this year to help employers understand some of the best practices out there, to put out guidelines that are agreeable between both the employers as well as the unions and the workers or the tripartite movement, putting together some of these learnings that we have had over the past few years and what works within a workplace.

On whether to make it mandatory, I think the challenge would be that every workplace is different. There are different work stressors at different workplaces too. And that is one of the reasons why we are rolling out the iWorkHealth pilot which is an assessment tool that MOM has developed with various partners to help companies understand the work stressors, for example, so that they can better understand how they can help workers cope with mental health issues and what are some of these stress points that cause mental issues at work.

But overall, if you look at the framework today, the Workplace Safety and Health Act already requires employers to take reasonably practical measures to uphold employees' health, including their mental health. Under the Act alone, there are certain obligation when employers will take care of their workers. And therefore, to some extent, there is safeguards in place to ensure that employers take this quite seriously.

On the Member's second point, whether we will measure this, certainly, every programme has got its objectives, targets, goals and KPIs and the various agencies, I am sure, will track the efficacy of each individual programme. But for us to track every single mental health issue at the workplace, this would be quite challenging, for example, trying to track MCs, how do you do that for individual workplaces? The second challenge would be this: when you deal with mental health, the root cause may not necessarily be from the workplace too. You do need to ascertain that the root causes are at work and whether we can deal with it better at work, for example.

But there are also cases, for example, where the root causes may be stressors at work and carried into work. This is where some of the recommendations from the upcoming guidelines could help such as providing counselling, access to counsellors, or additional measures where companies can make counselling accessible to employees or make the workplace less stressful or adapting to their challenges.

These are some of the measures that we can take at the workplace. This is an evolving area in which I think many of us, whether it is Government, whether it is the employers, are closely monitoring, given the fact that we do have to better understand the workplace stressors that our employees face, and especially today, under COVID-19 conditions.