When a strong performer resigns, the exit interview rarely tells the full story.
They say they're looking for a new challenge. They mention an opportunity that came along at the right time. What they don't say—what most employees in Southeast Asia would never say to an HR manager or their direct line manager—is that they've been struggling for months. That the anxiety crept in quietly and never quite left. They looked around for support and found nothing that felt safe enough to use, so they found a way out instead.
This pattern is more common than most organisations want to believe—and it has a compounding logic that makes it particularly damaging.
The People You Lose First Are the People You Can Least Afford to Lose
High performers with in-demand skills have options. When work becomes unsustainable—chronic stress goes unaddressed, mental health deteriorates without support, and the environment signals that asking for help carries professional risk—they leave. Lower performers with fewer alternatives tend to stay. Over time, this dynamic quietly degrades the average capability of your workforce, not through any single dramatic event, but through a steady accumulation of exits that each looked, on paper, like a personal career decision.
The financial cost of this is rarely calculated in full. According to Qualtrics, replacing an employee typically costs between 1.5 and 2 times their annual salary once you factor in recruitment, onboarding, and the productivity loss that lingers while a new hire gets up to speed. Gallup's research on the economic cost of poor employee mental health identifies it as a primary driver of voluntary turnover—meaning a significant portion of that replacement cost is, in principle, preventable. Multiply those figures across an organisation losing five, ten, or twenty people a year for reasons that could have been addressed, and you are looking at a significant, mostly invisible drain on profitability.
The Generational Picture Makes This More Urgent
The WHO and International Labour Organisation estimate that anxiety and depression alone cost the global economy $1 trillion annually in lost productivity. In Southeast Asia specifically, the generational composition of the workforce makes this figure especially relevant to act on now.
Naluri's latest research across more than 32,000 respondents found that 51% of employees are currently at high mental health risk. Among Gen Z workers specifically, that figure rises to 65%—and it is climbing. Deloitte's 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that nearly half of younger workers cite mental health support as a critical factor when choosing an employer. These are the employees at the start of their careers, building skills and relationships inside your organisation right now. They are also the employees who, when mental health deteriorates, experience the sharpest drops in performance. When younger employees reach high mental health risk, their performance scores turn negative—meaning they are operating at a net deficit relative to their potential.
This is not a problem that will resolve itself as organisations become more mental health aware. Awareness, on its own, doesn't change outcomes.
Why the Cultural Barrier Is More Significant Than Most Leaders Assume
In many Southeast Asian workplaces, the stigma around mental health remains deeply embedded. The TELUS Mental Health Index found that 72% of Singapore workers would be concerned their career options would be limited if their employer knew about a mental health issue—and that workplace stigma has barely shifted over the past four years, even as personal attitudes have slowly evolved.
This fear is not paranoia. It reflects a workplace culture in which, according to a previous Naluri survey, 72% of employees said they either didn't know or didn't believe their company provided any mental health or wellbeing support. Among Gen Z employees in APAC with mental health challenges, only one in three feel comfortable disclosing what they're going through.
When the cost of asking for help feels higher than the cost of struggling silently—or leaving—most employees will choose one of those two options. The organisations gaining ground on this are not necessarily those with the most generous benefits packages. They are the ones that have made support genuinely accessible, genuinely confidential, and genuinely free from professional consequence.
The Real Cost of Waiting
The uncomfortable truth is that most organisations are already paying the price of poor employee mental health—they're just not seeing it as a single line item. It's distributed across turnover costs, medical claims, recruitment fees, and the quieter, harder-to-quantify losses of reduced output from people who are present but not fully functioning. Because none of it is labelled "mental health," it rarely prompts a mental health response.
The leaders who are changing this aren't doing so because it's the right thing to do—though it is. They're doing so because they've done the maths and found that the cost of inaction is substantially higher than the cost of a meaningful, well-designed support strategy. They've recognised that a workforce where people feel psychologically safe, genuinely supported, and connected to real resources isn't a soft outcome. It's a competitive one.
The question worth sitting with is a simple one: among the people who left your organisation in the last two years—the ones you genuinely didn't want to lose—how many were struggling with something that never surfaced? The data suggests the number is higher than most leaders assume. And the time to address it is before the next resignation letter lands on your desk.
For more on what's driving employee mental health risk across Southeast Asia and what effective organisations are doing about it, read our report 2026 State of Employee Mental Health & Productivity or talk to our sales team.