Be Well, Lead Well: Mental Wellbeing as a Business Strategy

Organized by the Swedish Chamber of Commerce in Singapore and WorkWell Leaders at the Estonian Embassy in Singapore’s business hub, was encouraging on a number of levels. For one thing, members of 8 chambers formed the audience. A nice piece of collaboration. Thank you Lisa Ferraton.

For another, there was a time, just after the Covid-19 pandemic, when mental wellbeing and mental health were seen as standalone issues businesses need to manage. What is really encouraging is the conversation is moving more and more to seeing mental wellbeing as a symptom of workplace culture. If your workplace culture is toxic, it follows people’s mental wellbeing will suffer leading to physical and mental illnesses, absenteeism, lower productivity and underserved customers. Given that, on one estimate, Singapore loses SGD 16 billion a year in lower productivity because of employee absenteeism due to ill health; isn’t it time more businesses focused on the cause – workplace culture – rather than simply trying to address some of the symptoms?

To do so takes courageous leadership from everyone in a business. It starts with caring. If senior leaders care about themselves, their team members and their business, it is easier to be courageous. So, train and retrain every people manager to ensure the lived experience of every team member is equally good. Do that with clear values and behaviors to demonstrate your values, co-verified by and part of everyone’s KPIs from the board down. Add appropriate interventions to help the abused and the abusers when people do not live up to the agreed values and behaviors. Make sure interventions are applied to everyone regardless of seniority and revenue generation. This takes real courage but if you practice it, you will achieve psychological safety and trust for everyone. The results of positive workplace culture are positively transformational. Mental wellbeing will improve while rates of mental and physical illness will fall. Retention will increase as will productivity. Customers will be better served and your business will thrive. Everyone’s home life will benefit too because people will be less stressed. Why wouldn’t you want these outcomes?

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