Southeast Asia’s business leaders want wellness at work—as long as the programs get real results

Grand View Research, a market intelligence firm, put the Asia-Pacific corporate wellness market at $8.4 billion in revenue in 2024. That’s compared with a global market currently in the $50 billion range, according to Global Wellness Institute (GWI), with the broader wellness sector set to hit $9.8 trillion by the end of the decade.

But corporate spending on wellness is in the crosshairs as Asia grapples with softer global demand and higher costs. GWI points out in its research that workplace wellness is the only stagnant part of the growing wellness economy.

In Singapore, for instance, the CIPD 2025 Asia Employee Benefits Report shows that health and well-being benefits have declined by 6 percentage points since 2024, as employers trim back some well-being perks while holding insurance coverage largely flat amid rising medical‑claims inflation. 

Yet if companies indiscriminately cut wellness budgets, the savings are likely to be offset by lost productivity from higher sick leave, medical claims, and employee turnover. A joint study from Duke University and National University of Singapore estimated that anxiety and depression cost the Southeast Asian city about 15.7 billion Singapore dollars ($12.3 billion) in lost productivity every year. 

That risk is particularly acute when company wellness initiatives come in the form of off‑the‑shelf programs like generic apps or training modules. 

“These interventions don’t work because they don’t engage with working conditions and organizational design,” says William Fleming, a research fellow at Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Center, who was involved in the study. “Individual, psychological solutions treat well-being in isolation, and imply the problem is the employee’s ability to cope. They all try to change the worker, not the workplace.” 

For Fleming, organizations should instead see their workforce “as an asset” and “recognize the link between wellness and performance.” 

Southeast Asian companies with successful wellness programs have one thing in common: They treat it as a design challenge rather than a series of perks. Employers hold programs accountable—and if they don’t deliver, they’re cut, even if they’re popular. They ensure that wellness initiatives match a distinctly Southeast Asian dynamic, where workers avoid being tagged as struggling. 

According to Great Place to Work survey data, Southeast Asian employees who believed their employers offered special and unique benefits were 22% more likely to want to continue working at their companies. Employees who said their facilities contributed to a good working environment were around 3.2 times as likely to agree to go the extra mile to get work done. 

“What separates out organizations seeing real returns is how they listen and what they measure,” suggests Evelyn Kwek, managing director of Great Place to Work ASEAN and ANZ. “What are they willing to drop quickly, when something isn’t delivering?” 

Vietnam consumer goods giant Masan Consumer Holdings, for example, treats employee wellness programs as a P&L line item, reviewed quarterly at the executive committee level. “Wellness can really only earn credibility when it’s embedded into governance structures,” says Do Nguyen, head of talent management. “You need segmentation, data on things like attrition stability, absenteeism patterns, and productivity indicators.” 

One test came when Masan was faced with a reimbursement-style fitness benefit that was popular with employees, but didn’t move the needle on anything. “There was no meaningful impact on retention stability or productivity consistency,” Nguyen says. “Instead of keeping it on just for perception value, we reallocated resources toward more targeted programs.”

That decision gave executives more confidence in wellness initiatives that proved better in their measurement data, like fatigue management protocols, HR walks on the factory floor, and competitive physical challenges for frontline sales teams. 

Investors are why NagaCorp chairman Philip Lee cares about wellness. “Shareholders and investors visit us a lot. They walk the property; they talk to staff. When they see it’s a happy, healthy place to work, it signals we’re here for the long term,” says Lee. 

The Cambodian gaming and hospitality giant offers a 24/7 medical center staffed by six doctors and six nurses. As many as 33,000 NagaCorp staff used the clinic annually between 2023 and 2025, and the number of employees requesting sick leave fell by around 11% each year. 

We have absolutely discontinued programs when key indicators showed they weren’t achieving their impact,” Lee adds. One example was a digital occupational safety and health platform that didn’t yield a big enough drop in incidents. He sees discontinuing or redesigning a program not as a failure but as “a sign of disciplined governance.” 

At Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, Indonesia’s largest telecommunications company, executives learned that how a program is framed to employees can be the difference between success or failure. 

Lisa Qonita, senior vice president of people and culture, says that few employees adopted an early version of the company’s mental health initiatives. “When we framed it as ‘mental health support,’ uptake was limited, because of the stigma,” she says. “When we reframed it as a tool for performance resilience, stress optimization, and energy management, usage went up.” She adds that the initiative “needed to be contextualized, actively championed, and continuously validated through pulse checks.”

Indosat’s experience points to a broader truth about how corporate wellness is seen in Southeast Asia’s high-performance cultures: Employees gravitate to tools that help them improve performance and avoid tools that signal they can’t cope with pressure. 

Micron Technology, a U.S. semiconductor manufacturer, applies the same people-first principles in its Singapore operations. “The key for us is always to be adaptable and agile in terms of how we design the working channels for listening—both formal and informal,” says Joshua Lee, corporate vice president and Singapore country manager. The company benchmarks its internal reviews against an external index based on Great Place to Work’s global survey data. Employee resource groups for women, young professionals, and tenured staff also give workers multiple ways to share what is and isn’t working. 

In a business landscape marked by inflation, margin pressure, and AI-driven disruption, wellness that ignores work design will struggle to justify its place among skeptical executives. But programs tied to real metrics—lower injury rates, more stable frontline rosters, or less turnover during stressful restructurings—are more likely to survive budget cuts and ensure they keep doing the important work of keeping employees happy and productive.

Alice Williams is senior regional content manager for Great Place to Work ASEAN and ANZ.

This article appears in the April/May 2026: Asia issue of Fortune with the headline “Regional leaders want wellness at work—as long as the programs get real results.”