JCU Conversations is James Cook University, Singapore’s premier podcast series — bringing to you discussions with successful leaders in the industry (across fields such as business, education, urban design, and more) while offering a deeper understanding of their personal lives, careers, inspirations, and approaches to success. Join our rotating chair of distinguished hosts as we find out: What makes these bright minds tick?
Introduction 00:01
This is JCU Conversations, a podcast show from James Cook University in Singapore. Tune in as we ask experts in the industry more about their lives and their approach to success. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:16
Let's listen to today's episode.
Janlyn 00:20
Hi, I'm Janlyn, the President of the Psychology Society Student Group. We have Dr Sherry Aw, Lecturer in Psychology at James Cook University in Singapore with us today. Dr Aw specialises in topics such as employee wellbeing, empathy and emotions, managing work family and remote working. She's here today to chat with us about her expertise and research on such topics. Welcome Dr Sherry and thank you for joining us.
Dr Sherry Aw
Thank you for having me Janlyn.
Janlyn
So let's start with a bit about you, what do you do, why you pursue a career in psychology, a bit about your personal life and anything else you would like to add.
Dr Sherry Aw 00:57
Well, as you've mentioned already, I'm a lecturer in psychology and I specialise in organisational psychology. Why I was interested in psychology in the first place is probably, I think most students can relate to this, that interest in clinical psychology. We want to know why people have depression, anxiety, autism, ADHD and so on, and how can we help them? So a lot of helping motivation from the start. A second thing that also propelled my interest, I think, was before I started my undergrad and chose my major, maybe I'm dating myself here, but there was this whole, all these TV shows about criminal minds, lie to me and so on, and it's like, “Wow, you can read people from their emotional expressions, they have micro-expressions!”. And I was talking, there was also a lot of MBTI, graphology, right-brain training, these sorts of things. And I'm like, “Wow, if I study psychology, I can read people”. And unfortunately, and as you also know from your studies, is that, psychology is not so simple, right? But people are not straightforward and a lot of the questions that we have, it depends. Depends on the situation, depends on the person. So yeah, that's why I was interested in psychology. And a bit about my personal life is that I'm a mother of two, but two kids, one is six years old, the other one is one, or two, coming to two.
Janlyn 02:19
Okay, so besides teaching, you're heavily involved in research, especially on workplace wellbeing. What draw you to focus on this area, and why do you think it's such a critical topic today?
Dr Sherry Aw 02:31
Haha! So, earlier I mentioned the interest in clinical psychology, and why am I not a clinical psychologist? So, as I learn more about psychology, the field of psychology, and specifically clinical psychology, the self-reflection and awareness that I do not have the emotional fortitude to be a clinical psychologist, right? And these are a lot of these helping professionals, counseling, clinical psychology, caring professions, they are, we expect a lot from these professions. But who helps the carers? So, recognising my own limitations, I started to shift a little bit and sort of say like, okay, can we take care of the carers? What is it about their occupations that lead to high levels of turnover, high levels of burnout, and how can we prevent that? Like, you want to keep people of talent. So, I shifted towards, and my doctoral thesis focuses on the idea of empathy, and the idea that we want people who are service professionals to empathize with us, to care for us, but at the same time, is this empathizing going to be the cost of burnout? I said a double-edged sword to that. So, yeah, I wanted to look at employee well-being in general, specifically in the service sector, as well as in general. And beyond that, you know, work is a major part of our lives. It's like a work, family, and sleeping, right? I think also, basically, it constitutes a large portion of our well-being, and how can we help our employees thrive in that major domain?
Janlyn 04:02
Okay, okay, next. So, empathy is said to be critical for workplace relationship as is mentioned just now. Do you think it's something that can be thought or is it more of like a natural trait?
Dr Sherry Aw 04:14
So empathy is both a trait, like a disposition, there are differences in my empathy, your empathy, somebody else's empathy, but it's also a skill that we can practice. So when we talk about trait differences, it is about our natural tendency to be more or less empathetic, but that doesn't mean that we are fixed. One person always behaves in a particular way, and the idea is that hopefully we are able to train ourselves by practicing to be more empathetic. So empathy is also a skill, right? Sometimes, no matter how empathetic you are, you don't always behave in an empathetic manner. It depends on our own circumstances at any one day, but the idea is that we try, we deliberately want to be empathetic. Hopefully this becomes more automatic, and our natural tendency to be empathetic increases. So just as an example, I may not always be a very empathetic person, even though I want to study empathy, right? And sometimes my children, when they are not behaving well and so on, yesterday my son was during a temper tantrum after school, and I was very reactionary. I behaved in like a, should I scold him? Should we start that nagging kind of idea? And then I took a step back, and instead of scolding him, I had to kind of remind myself deliberately to go and ask him, how was your day in school today? And he sort of broke down crying because he had a bad day, but he didn't know how to articulate it. And then all he needed was really a hug. And then after that he felt better, like he was his usual cheerful self. So sometimes it's like the default mode, what is it? And hopefully, I have to remind myself, right, to try to be more empathetic. It might not always be easy, but to try.
Janlyn 05:55
Okay, so how do you think the idea of well-being has evolved in recent years, especially with the rise of remote work?
Dr Sherry Aw 06:04
I feel that well-being is maybe more like the history of well-being in general, right? Especially in the workplace, there used to be no discussion of well-being. I think, you know, we pay you, you come to the office, you work and then you go home. I don't really care about whether you're happy or not. And then as we learn more about psychology or even clinical psychology, we learn that people can be stressed and stress will negatively affect your performance. You can have negative implications on turnover. And sometimes we know that unfortunately people do commit suicide because of their work stress. Right, so companies start to shift to, are my employees doing okay? Like a neutral point, right? Are they doing okay? And more recently, we have shifted to positive psychology and we look at our employees engaged at work. Maybe it shifts to a bit more about work engagement again. And work engagement is really, are you focusing on your work? Still very productivity driven. And more recently, because of remote working, or not because of, but it's something in tandem with remote working, it's a bit of a recognition that employees are not just people in the workplace, but they have lives outside of the workplace. They want to balance their work family lives. They want to have hobbies, have interests, have other things beyond work. So the notion of well-being has, I think, grown from negative to neutral to work productivity. And then now they're recognizing that we are a whole person.
Janlyn 07:38
So interesting. So there's been some news lately where organisations have been mandating a full return to work schedule for its people. Why do you think that's happening?
Dr Sherry Aw 07:51
Largely because I think managing remote workers is hard, right, we have discussed briefly about how people are different and employees have different needs, different schedules that help them manage, making sure that everything is fair, for example, who gets to work remotely, how often you get to work remotely, it's difficult to implement a new system that is fair, that or equitable, that appeases everybody. So sometimes it seems like the easier way, maybe just to go back to default, and that is back to the office. Another reason for that could also be cultural, where some managers and different companies, right, not all companies are advocating for return to work, some have a bit more of a broader view, but so maybe it's a cultural thing where there are some companies who have a mindset or mentality that work is in the office, it's face time. So that's something that maybe we have to shift a little bit on. It's not that you can only be productive within the office, but you can also be productive elsewhere. And a final reason, which I think is also quite valid, is that there are social costs to remote working. So research has consistently demonstrated that remote workers, there is a social cost to remote working, because naturally you are not in the office, so people don't really get to talk to you so much, how do you make those connections? And from my own personal experience, because I do work remotely, I also admit that, you know, being in the office, seeing my colleagues, seeing you, my students, I actually enjoy that kind of that interaction, that conversation, like what we're talking about right now, I get to know people, I get to meet people, I learn more about the organization, I feel like I belong. If I were to work only at home all the time, then who am I within this organization? What is my identity like? Who is this organization about? So I think a lot of the social costs of remote working is a very valid thing, a concern for organizations to have. You want your people to be together, and sometimes the togetherness is that physical space of togetherness.
Janlyn 10:02
Okay, so how important is work-life balance to you and what do you think companies can do to ensure that?
Dr Sherry Aw 10:10
But for me, right, it's super important because I have two young children to take care of and so it's a function of, I guess, the season of my life. My two kids still are in the age where they need me. I'm still their bolster at night. So rightly, because they need me, I feel the need to be there for them. So for me, that work-life balance is very important. But like I said earlier, people differ from their circumstances. Whether you have young children, old children, no children, caregiving responsibilities, siblings, elders, and so on. So work-life balance means something different to everybody. And whether organizations can actually ensure that you have work-life balance is a bit of a stretch. Maybe it's not difficult or impossible to say everybody here has work-life balance. It's like a balancing act all the time. But I think what organizations can do is to provide that foundation or that potential for employees to, you know, if they need help, can I ask you about it? Can I approach my supervisor and say, you know, hey, something's happening in my personal life. I need some time. And how will my supervisor respond? Because you can imagine that if you were in an organization and you talk to your supervisor and they're like, you know, that's an admission that you can't cope. And they treat you negatively because of that. It's going to reflect badly on you. And it's not a company that, you know, you're comfortable. It may not be a company that you're comfortable telling or admitting that, you know, you have issues in your personal life. On the flip side, I know a mom friend who when she was struggling with sending her child to school, difficulty adjusting to school, she wanted to quit her job. So, she basically wrote her resignation letters, gave it to her supervisor and said, you know, I cannot work here because I feel that if I can't handle my family, I can't put in my full attention to work. It's not right for me. So, she actually resigned. But the supervisor read her resignation letter and said, no, you talk to me. What do you need? How can I help you? And, you know, he or she, the supervisor, offered my friend the opportunity to cut down her work hours, obviously with, you know, lack of money in pay. But I didn't think convert to part-time work temporarily. You know, just tell me what you need. Don't full on quit. And that's like a completely different atmosphere. Right. You want to stay for this leader. You want to be part of this organization. And it's a great way to retain talent. So, and obviously, you know, as the employee don't take advantage of your employer, it's just to perform to appropriate standards.
Janlyn 12:53
Oh, what a heartwarming story. So, if you could describe the ideal workplace in three words, what would they be?
Dr Sherry Aw 12:59
I'm going to borrow from self-determination theory and state that ideal companies should be able to provide their employees with autonomy, relatedness and competence. So autonomy, I will never give you a straight answer with three words, right? So autonomy is about having the freedom to choose where you work, how you work within the workspace as well, right? How do you do it? How do you execute your work tasks? So that kind of freedom gives us empowerment, relatedness is when we have, we're in a company that we have colleagues that care for you, we have supervisors that care for you, you feel like you belong to a social organisation and that affirms your own self-identity. And the final one is on competence. You want a job where you are able to make meaning, you're meaningful, you're able to contribute to it, you're able to excel, you're able to grow. So these three things.
Janlyn 13:55
Remote work and other changes often affect different groups of people in unique ways. What have you observed about how these changes impact diverse employee groups, such as parents, early career professionals or senior employees?
Dr Sherry Aw 14:09
Well, so I guess firstly remote work has recently been advocated as one of the primary tools for managing work family, which again, from me as a parent and a remote working parent, I do feel that I have benefited a lot from remote working. Specifically as a mom, however, I would admit that there are also potential costs to it. One of them could be that there's a perception maybe that women who want to work flexibly work for family reasons may not be dedicated employees, right? And this comes from some anecdotes that we have about women who are childbearing age intending to start a family or have a child on the way, employees treat them differently or they perceive them differently. And there's a bit of a concern that, you know, what if I request to work flexibly because of my family, would I be seen as a less desirable employee? So that's one potential cost there. But at the same time, it helps, right? Because you know, when I'm at work, when I am at work at home, my working remotely at home, my kids are in school, I get to focus on my work itself. And what I cut short is the commuting time, having to send my kids early to school and then pick them up late because of my commute. These things actually add on to the working parent's guilt, right? Sometimes we see like, “Oh, why is my child the last one in preschool and so on?”. There's an extra guilt there that with remote working, it's easier to pick up the child. So, these things actually help me, I think, to be a more productive, focused employee as compared to having to commute every day. And on the flip side, as a mom, yes, but on the flip side, we're not quite sure how remote working affects fathers. It's an interesting research question. Do fathers who want to work remotely because of their family, how are they perceived, how are they seen? Recently, there was some, not that recently, a couple of years ago, there was some, there was an article reported about fathers who requested paternity leave, right? How are they viewed? And sometimes not really great. I've also heard an anecdotal story about another friend of mine who, when her husband requested to leave to take care of their child, the employer actually said, you know, something along the lines of, “Doesn't your child have a mother? Why do you need to be the one to take leave?”. And that's like a slap in the face, I would say, you know, it's things that, why can't my husband help take care of the child also? It's not always on the mother. So, there's two things that we need to balance out, right? Is the mom always the primary caregiver? How can we encourage and embrace fathers to have a more active role in their life? And I feel like the conversation is moving towards that. We want that for life, we want that to be a good role model. So, I think with remote work, it does help to be a bit more equal, and hopefully more conversations can be had about parenthood. But beyond that, your other question was on how remote work affects younger employees and younger professionals.
Dr Sherry Aw 17:14
And then maybe I would go back to the social costs of remote working, where if you're not visible, how do you find mentors? How do you demonstrate performance? Because a lot of in the olden, quote unquote days, performance is visible. How are you done at work and so on. But if you work at home, can people see that you're working? So how do you demonstrate visibility in performance? How do you network? How do you volunteer for challenging assignments? And sometimes it's like, when you are there, people remember you. If you're not there, people forget about you. And you're kind of worried that would affect my promotion, would affect my performance appraisal. So, these things might be important and relevant. Some research on newcomer socialization actually shows that people who work remotely, or newcomers who work remotely, take longer to acclimatize to the new organization. So just the learning curve takes a little bit longer, and therefore that is of concern. And for senior employees, management wise, I would say, would be, again, with the performance. How do you know who is working on what? How do you track performance? Stuff like that. Things to get used to, communication.
Janlyn 18:26
So, you have likely come across many approaches to employee wellbeing in your research, so what are some strategies or initiatives that stood out to you?
Dr Sherry Aw 18:36
For employee well-being, the interesting one that made me go, “hmm”, was unlimited leave. Because I think that on the one hand, you know those no questions ask kind, you can take as many leave days as possible that kind. Everything is interesting right because it's a trust issue and demonstrates that number one your employer trusts you, number two you should also behave in a way that to be like okay I don't violate that trust. It was also interesting on a research perspective. How in a situation like that, how many days of leave are employees really taking? They're taking more than you would otherwise have given them or maybe you hire a lot of workaholics and they're actually taking fewer days right so it's an interesting question.
Janlyn 19:20
So if you're able to travel back in time, what advice will you give to your younger 21-year-old self?
Dr Sherry Aw 19:26
uh probably to be a bit braver um like I feel that in Singapore we're very comfortable and I've been I'm also very comfortable and sometimes to step out of that comfort zone is very scary uh and yeah I would probably try more things um and I always tell my son that you know being brave is not that you're not afraid of anything at all it's that even though you're scared you know you try right uh and it's easy advice to tell somebody it's easy advice for me to tell my son but if you ask me to actually do it also yeah it might be a little difficult yeah so um I also don't think that that is something that has an expiry date so maybe I even now perhaps I should try the same one say yes to more things yeah
Janlyn 20:11
Thank you so much for being here and this has been a fantastic discussion. Where can listeners find you?
Dr Sherry Aw 20:18
Well, thank you for having me. Listeners can find me on the JCU Singapore website. If you search my name, Sherry Awl, as a psychology lecturer, you can find my email address. Thank you so much.