China workplace mental health survey report

Nearly 68% of the respondents have moderate or above workplace anxiety, and only 17% of companies are equipped with a systematic mental health support system that can be implemented. Currently, there is no unified consensus on the cause of workplace psychological problems and intervention plans in the industry, and the effectiveness of universal solutions is less than 30%.

Last month, I was doing an in-depth offline interview at a leading e-commerce company in Hangzhou. Xiao Zhou, who had just been promoted to a full-time operations position for three months, pulled me to the fire escape during lunch break. She was holding the psychiatric outpatient medical record she had just taken. The words "Generalized Anxiety Disorder" on the cover were scratched with her fingernails. “Last month I got a B+ in performance, and my boss praised me at the weekly meeting. I hid in the subway and cried all the way after get off work, feeling that I was not worthy and would definitely fall off next time. ”There are three unopened boxes of soothing and brain-replenishing liquid in her drawer all year round. The cushion on her workstation is printed with the self-deprecating slogan "It's just for work", which is a peripheral product issued by the company during last year's Double Eleven. I have been working in this industry for almost 8 years, and I have seen too many cases of this kind of "everything seems fine to outsiders, but privately I can hardly handle it".

Interestingly, researchers in different fields have given almost completely opposite attributions to this widespread anxiety. Consultants from the clinical psychology school prefer to start from the perspective of individual characteristics. The director of the psychiatry department of a tertiary-level hospital with whom we cooperated in the research mentioned that the young professionals we come into contact with now generally have a smoother growth path, and their tolerance threshold for frustration is indeed lower than that of the previous generation of professionals. "Little things" such as performance fluctuations and conflicts between colleagues are more likely to trigger emotional breakdowns. However, researchers in the field of organizational behavior completely disagree with this judgment. A tracking study conducted this year by a team from Peking University Guanghua School of Management showed that 82% of the outbreaks of workplace psychological problems are directly related to corporate management mechanisms. Endless meaningless overtime, vague assessment standards, and business directions that change day and night are the core reasons for overwhelming employees and have nothing to do with "stress resistance." There are also researchers from the sociological school who have broadened their perspective and believe that the current psychological problems in the workplace are essentially the pain of the industrial transformation period. In the previous two decades of rapid growth, everyone assumed that "hard work will pay off." Now that industry growth has peaked and the upward channel has narrowed, the gap between expectations and reality will naturally give rise to widespread emotional problems.

Don’t think that these are just words from the academic world. When it comes to the practical level of enterprises, different attributions directly lead to completely different intervention plans, and there are also various pitfalls. The most outrageous case I have ever seen is a manufacturing factory in the Pearl River Delta. It followed the trend and purchased EAP (Employee Assistance Program) services last year. It actually directly linked the psychological assessment results to employees' regularization and promotion. In the end, everyone was in danger. When taking the assessment, they all selected "very satisfied" and "no emotional problems at all". Privately, the turnover rate of core positions increased by 12%. In the end, the boss felt that "today's young people are too pretentious."

There are also some good ones. Last year, a new energy car company in Shenzhen moved the EAP reservation portal from the OA system that requires real-name authentication to the anonymous WeChat mini program. It also specially provided a week of new energy industry knowledge training to the consultants it cooperates with to avoid "Why can't you accept the news about returning to get off work after work?" This kind of question is easy to stand up and talk. In half a year, the EAP usage rate increased from 3% before to 22%, and the voluntary turnover rate dropped by 7 percentage points in the fourth quarter of last year. An advertising company in Shanghai is even more interesting. It simply canceled the company-wide monthly performance rankings and gave the team two days of "paid sleep leave" every month. There is no need to write an application or say hello. If you don't want to come, you can't come. Anyway, the advertising industry relies on creativity, and people can't make a living even if they are stuck at their desks. After one year of implementation, everyone's self-assessed burnout score dropped by nearly 40%.

The most controversial issue in the industry right now is whether workplace psychological intervention should be "light" or "heavy." One group of people thinks it should be downplayed and don't make it look like "you have psychological problems and we will help you." Instead, it will put extra pressure on employees. Put some stress-reducing kneading toys in the tea room and open an anonymous complaint section in the company's internal forum. As long as everyone has an outlet to vent, the cost is low and there is no burden. The other group thinks that this is just scratching the surface. To really solve the problem, we must change the root cause. We must include team emotional health into managers' KPIs, forcing leaders not to resort to PUA at every turn, not to change demands casually, and to reduce the sources of emotional internal friction from the management side. There are successful cases for both ideas, and there are also overturns. No one says that their solution can be applied to all industries.

After completing this survey, my biggest feeling is not "how serious the problem is." It is that people finally no longer regard emotional problems in the workplace as "personal problems." The HR of an Internet company I worked with before was evasive when talking to employees about psychological problems in the past two years, for fear of being accused of "the company discriminates against people with unhealthy mental health." This year, he has taken the initiative to add a small course on "emotional first aid" to new employee training, telling everyone that if they have insomnia for a week in a row and don't want to go to work, don't force it, talk to a counselor first, and if it doesn't work, take a few days off.

It’s quite interesting to talk about. Last week, I was chatting with Professor Zhang from the Psychology Department of Beijing Normal University. He said that it is too early for us to talk about “solving mental health problems in the workplace”. The entire society’s understanding of this matter has just begun. If we can “not regard having emotions as a fault”, we have already taken a big step forward.