From Singapore to Malaysia, employees are being told to manage stress, set boundaries and look after their mental health. But what happens when the way work is organised makes those things difficult?

Most of us already know what we are supposed to do when we are stressed.

Get enough sleep. Exercise. Eat well. Take breaks. Switch off after work. Spend time with family and friends. Set better boundaries.

The advice is not necessarily wrong. The problem is that it assumes employees have enough control over their working lives to follow it.

It is difficult to switch off when your manager regularly messages after hours. It is difficult to protect your sleep when a 5pm request comes with a 9am deadline. It is difficult to set boundaries when saying “No” could be interpreted as a lack of commitment.

And it is difficult to exercise, prepare a balanced meal and spend meaningful time with your family when work has consumed most of your waking day.

At some point, burnout stops being a question of whether an individual is managing stress properly and becomes a question of how work itself is being managed.

Burnout is already showing up in Singapore and Malaysia

Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower (MOM) does not systematically collect workplace burnout statistics, but data from its iWorkHealth psychosocial assessment tool offers some indication of the scale of the problem.

Among more than 15,000 employees whose anonymised data was collected through employers using iWorkHealth in 2024, about one in three experienced work-related stress or burnout. MOM cautions that the voluntary nature of the assessment means the sample should not be treated as representative of the entire workforce.

Other surveys have produced even higher estimates. Employment Hero’s 2024 Wellness at Work survey reported that 61% of Singapore respondents had felt burnt out because of work within the previous three months. In Malaysia, the corresponding figure was 67%, based on a survey of more than 1,000 Malaysian employees.

Different surveys define and measure burnout differently, so these percentages should not be compared as though they were measuring exactly the same thing. What they do suggest is that work-related stress is hardly a marginal issue in either country.

There may also be consequences for employers that go beyond wellbeing. Randstad’s 2025 Workmonitor found that 59% of Malaysian employees surveyed said they had left a job to escape a toxic workplace, while almost half said they would reject an offer from an employer known not to foster a positive workplace culture.

The Asian work ethic can have a darker side

Hard work is hardly unique to Asia, and it would be simplistic to describe Southeast Asia as having one uniform working culture.

Still, ideas about diligence, endurance and putting collective responsibilities ahead of personal preferences have long had cultural currency across many Asian societies. At their best, those values can encourage discipline and ambition.

The problem begins when endurance itself becomes evidence of commitment.

China’s notorious “996” culture — working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week — is an extreme example of where that thinking can lead. Most Singaporean and Malaysian employees are not formally working a 996 schedule, but the underlying assumption can be more familiar: the person willing to stay late, answer messages on leave or repeatedly accommodate unrealistic deadlines is seen as more dedicated.

Technology has made those expectations easier to extend beyond the office.

There is no longer necessarily a clear moment when the working day ends. Email, WhatsApp, Slack, Teams and other platforms mean an employee can technically be reached almost anywhere, anytime.

Long working hours also carry risks beyond feeling exhausted. Research by the World Health Organization (WHO) and International Labour Organization found that working 55 hours or more a week was associated with higher risks of stroke and ischaemic heart disease compared with working 35 to 40 hours.

But hours alone do not explain burnout.

The International Labour Organization identifies excessive workload, long or unsocial hours, limited control over work, poor management, unclear roles and conflicting work and home demands among psychosocial risks in the workplace.

That matters because it shifts the conversation away from whether employees are sufficiently “resilient”.

Sometimes the problem is the job.

When workplace wellness becomes another employee responsibility

Many organisations have responded to growing awareness of mental health with Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs), wellness talks, counselling services, mindfulness sessions, fitness programmes or mental health days.

These initiatives can be useful.

But they can also sit uncomfortably alongside the conditions employees return to afterwards.

A resilience workshop cannot fix an understaffed department. A meditation app cannot change an unreasonable deadline. A wellness day does little if employees return to twice the workload the following morning.

There is a danger that workplace wellness becomes another form of individual responsibility: we have given you the tools, so now manage your stress better.

WHO’s recommendations on mental health at work go considerably further than that. They specifically recommend organisational interventions that address working conditions and workplace risks, alongside manager training and individual mental health interventions. Excessive workloads, low job control and job insecurity are among the workplace conditions WHO identifies as risks to mental health.

In other words, giving employees resources to cope matters.

Changing what they are being asked to cope with matters too.

What can companies actually change?

This is where conversations about burnout often become vague. Employers are encouraged to “support wellbeing”, “build resilience” or “create a positive culture”.

But workplace culture is expressed through everyday decisions: who gets the work, when it is due, what managers expect, what behaviour gets rewarded and whether employees have any meaningful control over how they work.

There are several places companies can start.

1. Treat workload as a management responsibility

If employees are chronically working late, leaders should not automatically conclude that they need better time-management skills.

Look at the work.

How many projects is the team handling? Have responsibilities increased without corresponding increases in headcount? How frequently are supposedly exceptional deadlines occurring? Are priorities actually being prioritised, or is everything urgent?

Regular conversations between managers and employees should therefore include workload, not just performance.

Singapore’s Tripartite Advisory on Mental Health and Well-being at Workplaces already recommends regular manager check-ins in which workloads can be reviewed and reprioritised where necessary.

The important word is reprioritised.

Asking an overwhelmed employee how they are feeling without being willing to remove, postpone or redistribute work changes very little.

2. Stop making employees responsible for enforcing every boundary

“Learn to say no” is common advice for burnout.

It also ignores workplace power dynamics.

An employee can set a boundary. Their manager can determine their appraisal, promotion prospects, salary increment and future opportunities.

Companies therefore cannot outsource healthy boundaries entirely to employees.

One practical example is after-hours communication. Singapore’s Tripartite Advisory recommends that employers establish expectations around communication outside working hours. One suggested practice is making clear that employees are not expected to respond to non-urgent calls, messages or emails until the next working day.

That still leaves an obvious question: what counts as urgent?

If everything becomes urgent, the policy means nothing.

Teams should agree on what genuinely requires an immediate response, which communication channel should be used for emergencies and what can wait.

3. Examine what your company actually rewards

Company culture is not what appears on the values page of the corporate website.

It is what people learn they have to do to succeed.

If two employees deliver equally good work but the person who replies at midnight, works through leave and never pushes back on a deadline is perceived as more committed, employees quickly learn what the organisation really values.

Leaders therefore need to examine performance and promotion decisions for hidden signals that reward overwork.

This does not mean rewarding people for doing less. It means distinguishing performance from availability.

Someone being constantly online is not necessarily producing better work.

4. Give managers the ability to manage, not just deliver

Managers occupy an uncomfortable position in the burnout conversation.

They can create unreasonable expectations, but they can also be trapped by them.

A manager who has been given an unrealistic target with inadequate resources may simply transmit that pressure downwards.

That is why telling managers to “be empathetic” is insufficient.

They need training to recognise distress and communicate effectively, as WHO recommends, but they also need enough authority to adjust workloads, negotiate deadlines and challenge priorities.

Senior leadership therefore has to be part of any meaningful burnout strategy.

Otherwise middle managers are effectively being asked to deliver the same results, under the same conditions, while somehow ensuring nobody becomes overwhelmed.

5. Make flexibility meaningful

Singapore’s Tripartite Guidelines on Flexible Work Arrangement Requests, which took effect in December 2024, require employers to have a process for formal FWA requests and to consider and respond to them properly.

That is useful progress, but flexibility should not simply mean relocating the same pressures.

Working from home while remaining contactable from early morning until late at night is not necessarily better work-life balance.

Meaningful flexibility gives employees some control over where, when or how work is completed while maintaining clear expectations around outcomes.

This matters because low job control itself is recognised as a psychosocial workplace risk.

6. Provide help before employees reach breaking point

Companies also need support systems for the people who are struggling despite preventive measures.

Recent data from Malaysia offers an interesting example.

Mental health company ThoughtFull published findings in August 2026 from a multi-year programme embedded within AIA Malaysia’s corporate group benefits offering. It covered 33,369 enrolled employees, with outcome data spanning January 2023 to March 2026.

The striking part was where employees sought help.

Some 13.7% engaged with preventive coaching, while 0.05% escalated to structured therapy and 0.07% used the crisis hotline.

Among 142 employees with valid pre- and post-programme DASS-21 assessments, mean depression, anxiety and stress scores declined significantly, and 63% showed measurable improvement within 90 days.

There are important limitations. The analysis was observational, and ThoughtFull itself does not claim that the programme directly produced cost savings for employers or insurers.

What the programme does illustrate is a different approach: mental health support does not have to begin only when someone decides they are sufficiently unwell to seek therapy.

Preventive support can be built into employee benefits and made easier to access earlier.

The goal shouldn’t be a workplace without pressure

There is another side to this conversation that is easy to lose.

Work can be demanding without being unhealthy.

Deadlines exist. Businesses face difficult periods. Teams sometimes need to work harder to launch something, respond to a crisis or seize an opportunity.

And many employees are ambitious. They want responsibility, progression, meaningful work and the satisfaction of achieving something difficult.

The answer to burnout cannot therefore be removing every form of pressure from work.

It is preventing exceptional pressure from becoming normal working conditions.

The ILO’s 2026 report on psychosocial working environments makes a similar distinction. How jobs are designed and managed — including workload, working time, autonomy, role clarity, support and organisational processes — influences both worker health and performance.

This is ultimately where sustainable ambition becomes relevant.

Being sustainably ambitious does not mean caring less about work or lowering expectations. It means creating conditions where people can continue doing meaningful, challenging work without repeatedly sacrificing their health and lives outside it.

For employees, there will always be some personal responsibility for recognising limits and taking care of themselves.

But organisations have responsibilities too.

Perhaps the next phase of workplace wellbeing in Singapore, Malaysia and the wider region needs to move beyond asking:

“How can we help employees cope with stress?”

And start asking:

“What are we doing that creates unnecessary stress in the first place?”

That is a harder question.

It is also one that a yoga class cannot answer.

Melissa Fann is the founder of The Wellness Insider and speaks and consults on Sustainable Ambition — helping organisations examine how workplace culture, management practices and expectations can support high performance without normalising burnout. For speaking engagements, workshops or workplace consultations, contact Melissa at [email protected].

References & Further Reading