Workplace Mental Health Blue Book

The current mental health problems of domestic workplace workers are never caused by a single "poor personal mentality", but are the result of the joint interaction of individual characteristics, corporate management logic, and industry cycle pressures. There is no universal solution that "suits everyone." Verified by the EAP (Employee Psychological Assistance Program) service data of 32 domestic companies in different industries, the most effective intervention path is the hierarchical response model of "individual stop loss + organizational adjustment + industry support". Any plan that only requires adjustments from a single party is essentially shirking responsibility.

Last month, when I was working on the EAP service of an Internet company, I met a girl who graduated from the 985 program in operations. She had just received her department’s quarterly S performance. She turned around and cried in the conference room for half an hour. She was still holding a half-drunk iced Americano in her hand, and @ messages from cross-department colleagues urging her to take over were constantly playing on the computer. HR's first reaction was to take her to the tea room and persuade her: "Is there something going on at home recently? How about taking two days off to adjust your mentality? ”She didn't mention that she had been working overtime until 11 o'clock every day for three consecutive weeks, and she was carrying four emergency projects that were thrown in at the same time.

Interestingly, when this case was discussed in an industry salon, the two groups of people quarreled fiercely.

One group is veteran practitioners who have been in management for more than ten years. They feel that today's young people are "poor in stress resistance": "When I first started working, I stayed up all night for a month without complaining. Why do people nowadays collapse after working a few days of overtime? ”This is actually not completely unreasonable. When we did the scale screening, we did meet many newcomers who had just graduated. Just because their boss made a few comments on their first report, they labeled themselves as "incompetent" and suffered from insomnia for half a month. This can indeed be quickly alleviated through cognitive adjustment. However, applying the experience of ten years ago to the current situation is indeed a bit difficult - in the past, you could be promoted to supervisor after only three months, but now you may have to face department optimization after three years. The nature of the stressors is completely different, and trying to compare "stress resistance" is inherently rogue.

The other group is young HR who have just entered the industry. They say that "it's all capital exploitation, and employees just need to lie flat." This view is also untenable. I met a girl before who was so anxious that she resigned after working in a large factory for half a year. After a year gap, she found a state-owned enterprise that did not work overtime. She was still internally consumed every day. The root cause was that she never solved the problem of "not daring to say no to others." If you really want to push all problems to the outside world, you are essentially avoiding the parts that you can control.

To be honest, we have been doing EAP for so many years and have seen too many companies turn psychological care into an image project. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent to hire a teacher to teach mindfulness meditation classes to employees. However, the classes were scheduled on Sunday afternoons. Employees were forced to sacrifice their rest time to attend. After the class, they had to make up for the unfinished work from the previous week. Instead, their anxiety scores increased by 12%. Last year, we made management adjustments for a manufacturing company in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. We didn’t give any fancy lectures. We only changed one rule: if there is a problem, we should first trace the loopholes in the process and not hold individuals accountable immediately. At the same time, we included “whether there is meaningless overtime” and “whether the division of rights and responsibilities is clear” into the evaluation indicators of department heads. After three months of tracking using the universal GAD-7 anxiety scale, the proportion of employees with moderate to severe anxiety dropped by 27%, and "high work pressure" among the reasons for leaving their jobs also dropped from first to third. If we really want to care for our employees, we should work less ineffective overtime and less blame, which is more useful than any psychological lecture.

Nowadays, there is a lot of controversy about "workplace insensitivity" on the Internet. Some people say it is a poisonous chicken soup to help the boss's PUA employees, and some people say it is an artifact of self-protection. I think this matter is not so black and white. The essence of insensitivity is "selective ignorance": whether your boss's bad look today is directed at you, or whether your colleagues said bad things about you during lunch break. The more you care about such bad things, the more internal friction you will have. Ignore it if you can. It can indeed save a lot of energy. ； But if it comes to your salary being deducted, your performance being robbed, or your legitimate rights and interests being infringed, and you still use your "insensitive" attitude, that's not self-protection, it's stupidity.

Don’t believe it, I’ve seen too many people who talk about “emotional stability” and then park their car on the side of the road and cry for half an hour on their way to get off work. There is really no need to force yourself to be "normal" all the time. When you encounter an idiot customer at work, going to the stairwell to scold him for five minutes is ten times better than holding it in your heart. There is another tip that we have recommended to our clients countless times: when you encounter a task that makes you particularly internally drained, force yourself to do it for 5 minutes, and then stop if you don’t want to do it. Most of the time, you will get into the state after doing it for 5 minutes. Even if you really don't enter the state, it is much better than sitting there fighting in front of the screen for two hours.

After all, everyone is paying more and more attention to mental health in the workplace. It is not that people have become squeamish now, but that everyone has finally realized that the prerequisite for "working well" is "living well". Enterprises should not always think about “mentality building” for employees. First, they should straighten out their own management logic. ； Don't be too impatient personally. If you really can't stand it anymore, change the environment. The sky won't fall. This is a common proposition that everyone has to face when the entire industry has developed to this stage. Whoever understands this truth first will be able to avoid detours.