Employers must address Middle East mental health duties proactively, say experts

The recommendation was made by Pinsent Masons experts at a recent event the firm hosted on workforce resilience, wellbeing and performance in times of uncertainty in the Middle East.

Employment law experts Luke Tapp, Sairah Narmah-Alqasim and Emma Noble of Pinsent Masons were joined at the event by Dr Fabienne Palmer, chartered clinical psychologist and chief of equity and inclusion at Smart About Health, where they highlighted how employers across the UAE and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) are facing a growing convergence between mental health and employment law compliance.

During the event, the panel highlighted that while the issue of employee mental wellbeing was once regarded as a standalone issue for HR officers to manage, requirements pertaining to mental health have since become firmly embedded in legal frameworks in each jurisdiction, requiring an organisation-wide response.

In the UAE, the Labour Law imposes an obligation to protect employee health, safety and welfare, expressly prohibiting psychological abuse, harassment and bullying, and requiring employers to maintain a safe workplace culture. Mental health is protected through anti-discrimination rules, the prohibition on psychological harm, and the UAE Mental Health Law, which provides protection, confidentiality and dignity.

The duty of care extends further in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) and Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) free zones, where there is additional emphasis on workplace risk management and employer accountability, aligned with international and common law standards.

In KSA, employers must provide a safe and healthy workplace, take necessary precautions against hazards, implement occupational health and safety measures, and are liable for workplace injuries and occupational diseases. In 2023, the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Law replaced the Disability Welfare Law of 2000 and expanded the framework to include non-discrimination, accessibility obligations, employment inclusion, and broader rights protections – with disability expressly capable of extending to certain mental health conditions.

In addition, the KSA’s Anti-Harassment Law of 2018 requires employers to prevent harassment, implement internal policies and reporting mechanisms, and take disciplinary action, with harassment defined to include verbal, physical and behavioural misconduct, including psychological harm.

According to Dubai-based Emma Noble of Pinsent Masons, while the trend of convergence between mental health and employment law compliance in the Middle East has been growing stronger for years, the ongoing conflict in the region should serve as a trigger for employers to reevaluate their approach to employee mental wellbeing now.

Employers should audit health and safety policies to confirm they cover psychological as well as physical risks and implement or update anti-harassment frameworks in line with the UAE Labour Law and the KSA’s Anti-Harassment Law, Noble said. They should further review disability and reasonable adjustment processes to capture mental health conditions, particularly in light of the KSA's 2023 Rights of Persons with Disabilities Law, she added.

Noble said employers also need to maintain robust occupational health and safety systems and ensure fair and non-discriminatory treatment for all employees, including those with health conditions, and advised them to move from reactive absence management to proactive wellbeing programmes. She said employers that treat wellbeing reactively are exposed to claims under health and safety, anti-harassment, anti-discrimination, and disability frameworks as the law continues to develop.

“There is an increasing focus away from physical health alone. Employers that want the best from their people in a time of distress must increase the support on offer – and make sure managers are on board and supported themselves,” said Noble.

“In both the UAE and KSA, mental health is increasingly engaged through duty-of-care obligations, anti-harassment law, and disability frameworks. There is an increasing expectation on employers to consider wellbeing in their decision-making – and failing to do so creates measurable legal exposure,” she said.

According to Noble, a lack of clear policies or frameworks, insufficient manager capability to handle difficult conversations, cultural stigma around speaking up, and the difficulty of balancing wellbeing with performance demands are among the biggest challenges employers need to address.

Noble said: “All of these are solvable – but only if organisations move from a reactive posture to a genuinely proactive one. Middle East workforces are made up of expatriate, local, and migrant workers with different needs – any wellbeing strategy must be culturally responsive to be effective.”

Dr Fabienne Palmer said: “It is encouraging that the law across the UAE and KSA increasingly treats mental wellbeing as part of an employer's duty of care. It affirms what has always been true, that we all have mental health, and that it is enhanced or depleted by a range of factors, the work we do among them. When uncertainty goes on for long, the strain builds, and it is often the colleagues who held things together early on who are most worn down later.”

“Clinically we refer to this as ‘allostatic load’ – the cumulative toll of staying on alert, and a normal, expected response to sustained pressure. How well people withstand that pressure is not a fixed personal quality; it depends heavily on the conditions and support around them. By the time it shows as absence or a complaint, much of the cost has already been paid, so the task is to support people while that support can still make a difference, and to attend to how differently colleagues are placed rather than assume one programme suits everyone,” she said.

Palmer said it is often managers that carry much of the load and absorb the strain unnoticed. She said they should not be asked to look after their teams without being looked after themselves. In practice, managers should have a “clear and realistic role to notice, listen and signpost rather than to fix”, be given the skills to hold difficult conversations, and have “somewhere to take their own load”, she said.

“The question for leaders is not what this support costs, but what it is already costing them to go without it: in turnover, in mistakes, and in the slow loss of the experienced people they most wanted to keep,” Palmer said. “The same attention that lowers legal risk protects the judgement and trust the work depends on.”