Many Singapore companies offer a peculiar kind of workplace benefit: one that exists mostly in the HR handbook. Managers will tell you it is there. Employees, asked the same question, will tell you they have never come across it.
That gap sits at the centre of the Jobstreet by SEEK Singapore Workplace Culture Study 2026. The study was conducted by Milieu Insight among 600 employees and jobseekers and 200 hiring decision-makers. Half of employees (50 per cent) say they receive no organisational support at all to cope with always-on demands. Only 22 per cent of employers admit to offering none. That is a 28-percentage-point difference between the help bosses believe they provide and the help workers can actually find.
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Earlier instalments of e27’s reading of this study looked at why flexible work changed where Singaporeans work but not how much, and why 85 per cent of employers expect staff to stay reachable after hours. This one asks a simpler question: if the support exists, where is it?
The benefits nobody can find
The gap repeats itself in every type of support the study measured.
- Structured workload conversations: 40 per cent of employers say they hold them, but only 22 per cent of employees say they have had one.
- Boundary protections, such as rules that shield time off: 36 per cent of employers say they provide them, against 19 per cent of employees who notice them.
- Confidential feedback channels: just 13 per cent of employees know one exists.
There are two ways to read these numbers, and both are probably true. Some employers are being generous to themselves; the employer answers are self-reported, after all. Others may genuinely have the policies, but nobody has told staff about them, trained managers to use them, or made using them safe.
Either way, the effect on a worker staring at a 10pm message is the same. A boundary policy that nobody enforces is not a boundary. A workload conversation that never happens cannot redistribute any work.
Awareness is not the problem
What makes the gap hard to excuse is that employers are not in denial. Among those whose organisations expect always-on behaviour, 81 per cent recognise the long-term downside. Some 66 per cent say any short-term productivity gains come at the cost of eventual burnout.
Yet 48 per cent of those employers have no plans to introduce supportive policies. They can see the risk, and they have decided not to do anything about it.
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The budgets point the same way. AI and digital skills training tops employers’ investment priorities at 34 per cent. Workload management improvements attract 13 per cent, and extra hiring to ease the pressure just 12 per cent. In other words, Singapore companies are teaching staff to do more with better tools, not giving them less to do. As e27 noted earlier this week, employers are spending on the wrong fix.
Annual leave as a repair shop
When organisations do not build recovery into the working week, employees improvise. The study finds that 43 per cent of workers rely on taking leave to recover from always-on demands. Another 9 per cent say they lack the time or energy to recover at all.
That turns annual leave from a holiday into scheduled maintenance. It also means the cost of always-on culture is hidden from the people who could change it. Exhaustion does not show up on a dashboard as burnout; it shows up as a leave request, a quieter team member, or a resignation letter. Some 36 per cent of employees are already exploring new jobs because of wider workplace concerns.
The missing middle
If the policy exists at the top and the need exists at the bottom, the break is usually in between: the line manager. Research has repeatedly shown that the manager has an outsized effect on wellbeing at work, and this study puts a number on what happens when that link fails.
The report’s prescriptions are telling in how ordinary they are. It suggests managers hold explicit alignment conversations: rank the team’s priorities, agree on what counts as urgent, and set out who covers what outside working hours. It also recommends regular workload audits that force trade-offs whenever priorities change, so teams know what can be paused or dropped rather than simply added to the pile. Coverage handovers before leave would let staff actually switch off.
None of this costs much. Most of it costs nothing. That is precisely why its absence says so much. The obstacle is not money or knowledge; it is that nobody has been made responsible for doing it. Wellbeing strategies built around apps and webinars tend to fail for the same reason, which helps explain why corporate mental health efforts so often disappoint.
The problem is sharper for startups. Lean teams have no slack, and founders often double as the only managers, so the “missing middle” is the founder’s own calendar. Elsewhere in the region, workers are not waiting for HR. In the Philippines, where flexible work has become the price of talent, employees are already using AI as a burnout shield.
A caveat, and a test
The usual caution applies. This is a Singapore-only sample, employer responses are self-reported, and a jobs platform has an obvious interest in a restless workforce. The study’s categories are also loosely defined, so the exact size of each gap matters less than which way it points. And it points the same way every time.
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That suggests a simple test for any Singapore employer reading this. Ask your team, anonymously, which of your support policies they have used in the past six months. If the answer surprises you, you have just measured your own perception gap. Support that staff cannot see, or do not feel safe using, is not support.
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