Adjournment motion on strengthening mental wellness at the workplace

Firms should better equip their human resource (HR) departments to improve mental wellness at the workplace. These include helping them to acquire skills such as organisational psychology and designing evidence-based health and well-being corporate programmes. MP Edward Chia made this call in his adjournment motion in Parliament on Monday (Feb 6). He also urged the Government to raise the bar for grants by assessing the mental health of workers of the firms which are applying for them. He proposed that Enterprise Singapore's grants, such as the Enterprise Development Grant and the Productivity Solutions Grant, include a survey on employees' well-being before and after the implementation of the project to measure potential improvement of employees' wellness in addition to employee value-add gains. This will ensure that any company transformation takes into account the human wellness element to ensure better sustainability of outcome, he said. Mr Chia said that over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a reframing of mental wellness in the workplace from a "nice to have" to a "critical business imperative". He stressed the need to make mental wellness an organisational priority and sustain growing wellness policies and programmes. Responding, Minister of State for Manpower Gan Siow Huang said these suggestions will be taken into account. She said they align with existing initiatives such as free mental well-being workshops for smaller firms. Besides getting employers and HR to create more supportive workplaces, workers have to take ownership of their mental well-being by taking active steps to stay positive mentally and seek help when needed, she said.