Shaping well-being for tomorrow’s workforce with Dr. Andrew Tay

Speaker A: Foreign. Good afternoon. Welcome listeners. Welcome to the new Shape of uh, work podcast. Uh, really excited uh, to have this session today and very timely. As many of you will know, May is mental health month and I wanted to bring you a speaker this month, uh, 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. Uh, 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? It was 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, uh, about this topic and how well prepared we are in the workplaces of today to welcome the workforce of tomorrow. We all know I think the rising incidences of mental health challenges are just going up and up. Uh, I do global talent trends every year research at Mercer and 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 uh, many of our listeners are grappling with related to this. Um, but today we're going to take a slightly different slant on it. I'm going to be chatting with Dr. Andrew Tay, Chief Wellbeing Officer at the National University of Singapore. And I'm excited to have you on Andrew, for two reasons. 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, uh, the fact that you get to work up close and personal with the next generation of talent. You know, in those MBA master's programs, they literally leave your premises and walk into ours. So I can't think of anyone, anyone better to give us a glimpse on the future. Uh, Andrew, thank you for agreeing to be on the podcast and welcome today.

Speaker B: Thank you Kate, thank you for having me. Uh, and really, really happy to be here to talk about, uh, well being. The topic of well being. Right. Which is so close to all of our hearts. Um, I'm so glad to you how we even got this achieve lobbying officer role.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, why don't we even start there? Because, you know, uh, well, why don't I have to hear a little bit about you and your journey because I do think that, you know, there's reasons why you were able to get the chief role off the ground. So maybe A little bit. And then. Yes. How did you get such an important role, you know, with that title? And why did you feel that was important for you to be able to gain traction?

Speaker B: Um, thank you for the question, Kate. Um, 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 public health. Uh, so, which means you find these public health practitioners working in the government and there will be advice the public to say exercise more, sleep more, eat healthy. Um, but you'll find that such messages tend not uh, to be as powerful as uh, from a workplace perspective. Now occupational health comes from the uh, 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 of say for example tweaking the ways of working in the workplace or even tweaking the HR policies, 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. Um, 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.

Speaker A: Interesting, interesting. And you're so right. I mean I wake up with those mantras 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, um, 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 um, chief wellbeing officer role get established and what sort of drove that?

Speaker B: Yeah, so this is an interesting question that people ask me. So what does achieve well being officer do? Right? Do I sleep the most, do I exercise the most? Do I eat healthily? Um, the answer is it depends. But I don't. I, I do. I do have to set a good example because of what the title um, um is illustrating. And I'm representing uh, my organization. Right. But um, 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 uh, well being is of organization approach. Um, 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. Um, so my role is to negotiate with every stakeholders. That includes hr. Uh, and we also need to understand that even in the function of hr, there's HR business partner, there is HR common band, colleagues, and there's also HR learning and transformation and development. So all of them helps to uh, create an ecosystem that help facilitate the uh, uh, application of well being in everyday setting. Um, now in the context of nus, uh, the Chief Wellbeing 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. Um, it also gives me a lot more power, uh, gravitas to drive change just because I'm representing the Office of the President so that I can get my stakeholders to meet uh, and be aligned in some of the initiatives. But that doesn't mean that I go in to strong arm um, people. Uh, 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, uh, better productivity and eventually um, a healthier workforce.

Speaker A: You know, driving up productivity, um, improving our engagement scores are very much home ground for many of our listeners. Um, 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 um, part of hr, it's going to be quite hard to have, have the impact that you want. And I think in organizations we have exactly the same challenge that we need to solve. Um, I mentioned earlier that we got a chance to connect at a great conference last year. I think we were both speakers and you got up on stage and said, I don't want any of you to take any photos, but I'm going to share some stats. And you shared stats about our uh, 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. Um, 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. 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. Um, so it is a multicultural challenge and then they go back to around the world. Maybe you could share a little bit about um, what were those sort of stats? I know you don't want to share the Figures but just sort of the picture it was painting. Why you felt it was so important to speak to hr, the implications. And I don't know if any of those stats have changed in the last year.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, uh, probably. I'll just share a little bit in terms. Let me start off with why it is important for HR to uh to be engaged to talk on the topic of our uh workforce well being. Especially uh um we are uh training the next batch of our uh workforce who will be entering into your workplace. Um it is important for HR to anticipate the uh kind of issues that the uh young people are facing um before they enter the workforce and the kind of support that can help them in thriving in their respective roles. Um for example the students in NUS have gotten used to the idea of a uh coaching service um provision to deepen their skills. Um this can help HR to be more aware of such a trend and consider allocating budget for coaching services on top of the traditional EAP counseling services. Um you know because the traditional counseling services may not be suitable to help employees on skills related uh anxiety such as uh procrastination, time management, executive presence or even doing presentation. Now these are not mental health challenges but they are skills based uh related anxiety and sometimes providing coaching may be more appropriate. So it helps HR to plan for the type of services that will help uh the next generation of workforce. Secondly uh it is also important for HR to be aware of the way that student learning um has evolved and how it is delivered. Um currently it is much more experiential and with greater emphasis on this concept of student life. Our data showed that when students are consumed uh when they consume their learning through remote learning environment the risk of them developing self esteem issues uh actually increases as they interact with one another through computer platform. So this is an impact in the design of remote working policies or work in office arrangements. Um if you emphasize more on the work in office arrangement it actually allows for the working community to connect socially have ah water cooler talks or corridor conversation. Such informal um interactions interactions actually improve goodwill and collaboration. It actually improves um connectivity and reduces isolation as well.

Speaker A: 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. 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 um, some of the anxiety that people feel is actually skills based, you know, prioritization, executive presence, presentation skills. I hadn't really thought about that. But, but in the world that we are today, and you and I are on a video together, um, 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.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. Also, um, looking at us uh, through the um, computer platform right now, uh, you have the camera on yourselves. And just before we started this recording we were talking about, you know, how do we look on the camera? And there is a great tendency for us to keep looking at ourselves wondering uh, if I have this haircut or if I should have put on this makeup or maybe I should have put on, stuck on some braces, um, to help in straightening my teeth. So this has subtle impact in terms of self esteem. Uh, and we've, and we saw actually um, the stock market of some of these um, aesthetic related companies actually skyrocketed uh, during the, the time of our Covid because they are more self aware of their presence and their presentations uh, 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.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And I do feel that um, you know, 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. Um, but yeah, not everybody feels comfortable in doing that. I actually turn off my video so I don't look at myself. But that's probably to do with my age. But Andrew, what I found quite interesting about your research is you also said, saw that during the COVID years some of those more um, insecurities came up and you could actually track them in your data like 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. As you look at the most recent data that you have, um, is there any think that's emerging now that you think is new or new challenges that we need to be aware of? Yeah.

Speaker B: So um, let's talk a little bit about some of the trends that we saw during the COVID year. So in 2021 and 2022 the top diagnosis or the top reasons for why students come to seek counseling help was actually on self esteem and self image. So how they ah, um, and how they consume the world. Because the way that they consume the world at that point of time in lockdown was through social media and social media therefore gave uh, uh a form of reality that is not really real um, but that to them is the way that they view the world, how they look, um, and if they find themselves not looking like how the social media is portraying, um, a human is behaving um, talking, interacting or even looking the like it uh, has an impact on their self esteem because they feel like they are ah, um, they're not there or they're not ready. Um, Fast forward to 2023 and 2024 when we um, have all the students back into the campus. Um, we place a lot more emphasis on student life. We place uh, uh 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 um, if we focus too much on remote working it does play a huge role in terms of how our uh, well being is going to be like for our population.

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

Speaker B: Um, I would say looking at our data over here, the students in NUS are technically very strong. They're highly motivated. So uh, the top three, uh one of the top three reasons for encounter right now is academic stress. So the stress uh, due to the academic rigor, um, many of them um, find that they cannot settle for B. They need to go for A, um and unfortunately in almost all academic institutions there will be some form of bell curve, um grading and which means that some people definitely will get B and if that happens to some of our students they find it hard to accept and of course it increases the competitiveness um among our students and that has a huge um, strain on the mental well being of our students. Um, we try very hard to pivot away from such pursuit of scores by injecting more student life, um, um focus and curriculum and for the first time we have um embark on this, what we know as NUS1 curriculum and that is to expose our students towards something that's more generic in terms of education. And it also includes um, things like 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 um, uh self uh improve the well being of our students through equipping them with some of the self care ah skill sets.

Speaker A: Well we'll get on to some of the um 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. Um, but just listening to you there I see some parallels with our performance management system. Um, one of the challenges many clients say to us is this sort of 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 kind of link it to the reward system because of affordability issues. And just handling those conversations, you know has been really tough for managers. Um, but I wouldn't mind just picking your brains on this um, sort of relentless pace we have going on at the moment around productivity. You know we are wanting to see more and more every year. We have many more increased digital ways of working. Um, what impact do you think this will have on our younger people long term?

Speaker B: Yeah. So my advice is for the employers especially in the Asia Pacific region to be very careful of um, overly pivoting to remote working. Um because this can actually slow down decision making process and also productivity. You, you really your people to be together, to connect together. Um so do spend time in some of the team bonding activities to help break eyes facilitate some form of uh, 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. Um, the second item is the um self care. Um, I am very concerned and of course we are very concerned about how our Asian uh colleagues, or rather colleagues working in Asia Pacific, um, 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 M. UK and the US um, um, our colleagues in Asia Pacific usually are the one that will dial in uh after office hours at about 11pm or 12 midnight. And that blurring of your work life boundary can really have a creeping impact on the person's well being. And when you have chronic sleep deprivation, um, it actually can show up in the medical claims, uh, 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, um, 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, uh, in the workplace, uh, is really really important to help protect one another so that we can really take the time to recover and be more resilient.

Speaker A: That really rests for managers, doesn't it? Because I spent 10 years working out of Hong Kong in a global role, uh, for a US headquartered business. And you're right that 11 to 12pm you know, it gets tough, um, particularly if you're the more minority participants and there are more.

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker A: In the US and the uk. Um, but you know, it's interesting to hear you talk about, you know, the impact that that can have, which still comes back to our budgets and uh, um, the sustainability of our work cultures. Um, 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. Um, 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, you know, skills based anxiety. What are the kind of things we might need to train young people on, um, the link with remote working and self esteem issues, um, and how too much of that can slow down decision making, how we 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 um, very close to the data. So you know, what has impact and doesn't have impact? I mean I, you know you just do these amazing experiments. But any, anything else that you can share with our listeners today that they could think about bringing into their firms?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we are starting, starting off um, 2024, which was last year. We have started to track the concept of incivility. So the concept of incivility is similar uh, to the concept of passive aggressiveness, um, how maybe measure two items. One, do you experience passive aggressiveness in the workplace? Number two, um, how much does your department tolerate passive aggressiveness, uh, as a working culture? And it is yielding fascinating insights regarding um, the Experience of incivility or passive aggressiveness in the workplace. We found that um, in departments that have a lesser uh, experience of uh, instability, they are 26% more likely to have uh, employees not taking medical leave. So that has an impact on your actual productivity, which means the people really turn up. Uh, so you are 26% more likely to have your employees not taking medical leave and show up for work and they are happier. Also, we also found that um, in departments that have got uh, lower scores on instability, which means they experience um, uh, healthy environment, uh, they are uh, 3.9 times, 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 uh, 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. Um, you cannot tolerate, um, rude gesture. You cannot tolerate remarks, uh, that were um, 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. Do they feel insulted? Um, 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're too sensitive. No, that wasn't what I meant. Uh, uh, well, the meeting has ended. I don't think I meant it that way. But um, let's just move m on shall we? And so that's the what, 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 okay, this is not okay. And I uh, want to call out that action. Perhaps you're trying to make a point this way, but it landed across as very rude and I want you to apologize at this point of time. So if all leaders are able to call out such behavior in a meeting openly, immediately the psychological safety is felt among the team members. So I'd like our leaders out there to really start practicing that. And uh, you can see that your engagement score will actually improve.

Speaker A: It's really interesting because you're right. It's such an intangible, um, it's hard to measure. And so many times in engagement surveys, a lot of those things around values, diversity, inclusion, get really high scores because people are all, 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 so you would get a more sort of accurate read on it. But you know, I'm sitting here and hearing you be pretty assertive around. This is the behavior we will tolerate and this is what we won't. And I don't see so much of that in the workplaces today. Um, but I think it could have a tremendous impact on all the things you brought up earlier. The willingness to collaborate, speak openly, um, self esteem issues and just speed of decision making. You know, if, if we have that incivility there, it's all going to have, you know, an impact and spin out business outcomes. Really, really interesting.

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker A: That's right. Right. We are coming to the end of our time together. Um, unfortunately, you know, I'm sure there's probably a few people listening in saying, why don't we have a chief wellbeing officer? There's enough writing on the wall about how our workforce is feeling and there's a lot of, there's enough financial ramifications if we get this wrong when we look at our, our health spend, our well being spend, you know, the rising incidences and non communicable diseases and all of that that you brought up. You know, what would be your advice for them in sort of getting something like that off the ground or chief negotiating officer as you called it? Um, 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.

Speaker B: Yeah. So the first thing to think about when you want to set up the uh, wellbeing expertise in the workforce is to think about the structure. So my opening questions to huh, the audience has always been if you have the chance to set up a health and well being unit or expertise, where will you uh, 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 uh, learning and development? Or would you put on, put it under organizational development? Um, 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 that is housed under there, um, but where you house this house and wellbeing expertise will generate, um, pros and cons. And then there are limitations also towards the role. Say 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 and D colleagues or even your people management training curriculum. Uh, and if your L and D colleagues were to tell you that, sorry, that is not my priority, then you realize that you're stuck somewhere. Um, so in order to make sure that everybody is aligned and understand that wellbeing 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 wellbeing expertise. In the context of nus, we intentionally house it under office of the President because we know that it is the whole of organization approach. Secondly, um, what you can do is then to chair a committee consisting of a variety of stakeholders from hr, um, campus infrastructure, um, health and safety, and even people manager and leaders, uh, to come in and uh, talk about what is their own individual role as a people manager, as a health and safety, uh, uh, practitioner from a HR perspective, um, how can we actually tackle and approach uh, health and well being, um, 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 well NUS framework, or you can try to Google well NUS framework, um, and you'll be led to our website and you'll find that that framework is very, very um, simple and intuitive to approach, to systematically identify what are the gaps, uh, that an organization may have. And you use that to prioritize the initiatives that you want to uh, engage in. Uh, lastly, engage consultants from time to time. I know that Mercer has got Health Solutions team, um, 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.

Speaker A: M. Well Dr. Andrew Tan, thank you so much for your thoughts and comments today. Um, 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, um, particularly around some of those skills. I hadn't really thought of that linkage there and I think, you know, there's an onus on us within organizations to fulfill those gaps. Um, and make sure that we've got good policies around, uh, time zones showing up to work and where we intentionally do or do not use our, uh, remote working. M been absolutely fascinating. Um, and thank you for sharing those resources that you have as well. I think, um, I certainly will be poking my nose in on that. Uh, listeners, if you've enjoyed today's podcast and you want to dive into these issues more, we've got, um, 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. Um, and we're really passionate about sharing our research and insights into this important area. Uh, Andrew, thank you so much for your time again today. Um, and everybody, thank you for tuning in. Have a good rest of day, everyone. Bye. Bye.

Speaker B: Goodbye.