How to Support Employees’ Mental Health in Malaysia

Mental health in the workplace is a topic that isn’t often discussed — but it should certainly be. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), depression and anxiety both contribute to detrimental economic consequences, with an estimated cost of USD1 trillion down to lost productivity. 

As such, it’s important to create a health workplace, with WHO recommending 3 key elements in this regard: 

• Protect mental health by reducing work–related risk factors.

• Promote mental health by developing the positive aspects of work and the strengths of employees.

• Address mental health problems regardless of cause.

If you’re a manager or a key leader in your organisation, here are 3 ways you can support your employees’ mental health in Malaysia. 

1. Build a transparent culture with regular check-ins

The days of annual — or even biannual — check-ins with managers are long gone. Now, it’s crucial to be checking in with your team on a regular basis, ensuring that you are aware if anyone is potentially struggling. 

According to the Harvard Business Review, employees are 38 percent more likely to reveal mental health issues if someone at their companies had simply asked if they were doing okay. This serves to highlight why it’s important for leaders to initiate this discussion, and to make time to truly find out how employees are doing. 

At the end of the day, treat your employees like how you’d like to be treated. For a more detailed breakdown, read the following useful guides:

- How to Promote Effective Collaboration in Your Company in 2022

- How to Design Effective Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Strategies in 2022

2. Offer flexibility to your employees

As the pandemic has shown, flexibility is now a key element of the modern workforce. Of course, you’ll need to implement the right digital tools and infrastructure to execute this type of arrangement effectively (while maintaining, or even improving work performance). 

Now, it’s important to understand that flexibility is a concept that goes beyond mere physical work locations. Instead, the modern day worker appreciates flexibility with work hours, or even work days required — with many employees now coming from a global (and remote) talent pool. 

But different companies, departments, jobs, and even individuals may require different things at different points in their careers. Similar to the point above, ensure that leads and employees have an open dialogue about what the latter needs, such as family responsibilities, commuting issues, or even things like burnout. 

3. Reduce the stigma of mental health

Almost everyone has experienced mental health challenges throughout their lives and careers, but there remains a degree of stigmatisation when it comes to employees talking about their mental health. As managers, it’s important to be open when it comes to normalising challenges to mental health — this helps to ensure that employees are comfortable enough to share their own struggles. 

In fact, studies prove that employee engagement and performance can be significantly improved with “authentic leadership” — building trust within the organisation is key to that. Consider setting up mental health forums/talks, or even mental health groups where employees can share their own challenges, and work together with leaders. 

4. Offering mental health days to your employees

Another step you can take to reduce/remove the stigma of mental health is to offer mental health days to your employees. This is basically a form of sick leave — but one that takes into account employees’ mental health, instead of only their physical health. 

You can, of course, include this into the annual allocation of sick days per employee, but it might be a better idea to offer it as a separate leave entitlement — to further encourage employees to take these days off for their mental health. 

In general, you should also motivate employees to take their full allocation of annual leave each year, or at least, a significant portion of it. Everyone needs a break, and as employers, your employees will return to work fresher, recharged, and ready to achieve business objectives after a well-deserved break. 

And if you’ve already digitalised your HR processes with a powerful HRMS like altHR, you can use the Leaves module to manage all entitlements and allowances for your employees. If you’re still using manual, repetitive-based work to track these entitlements, read the next section of this article.