Workplace mental health education

The core of workplace mental health education has never been to teach employees "how to endure grievances and work well", but to help both companies and individuals establish a two-way collaboration mechanism in which "emotional risks are shared and pressure boundaries are clear" - it neither feeds employees the chicken soup of "suffering is a blessing" nor forces companies to compromise without a bottom line. It is essentially a win-win tool to reduce internal friction in the workplace and enhance the happiness of both parties.

Last year, when I was doing employee status research for a small and medium-sized cross-border e-commerce factory in Hangzhou, it happened to be their first mental health training. The boss had a very simple idea at first: find a lecturer to brainwash the employees so that they would not quit because of working overtime or being scolded. As a result, the lecturer he hired said, "We should treat the company as our home, and the leadership's criticism is the nourishment for growth." The employees in the audience were all ashamed. The turnover rate increased by 12% in the month after the class, and there were three more anonymous complaints saying that the company engaged in "PUA training." Later, we completely revised the content and gave a three-hour small class to the management. The core of it was to talk about two things: do not send work messages after get off work for non-emergency matters, and clearly state the rights and responsibilities when assigning tasks and do not blame others. ； The courses given to employees are more practical: how to reasonably refuse work that does not belong to them, communication skills on how to compensate for overtime work, and how to promote and transfer positions if they cannot handle the pressure. With such a simple adjustment, the team's internal friction complaints dropped by 60% within half a year, and the turnover rate also dropped below the industry average.

Interestingly, there have been two completely different ideas in academia and business circles regarding how to conduct mental health education in the workplace. The traditional "individual adjustment school" follows the path of mainstream EAP, believing that the core causes of workplace psychological problems are insufficient individual resistance to stress and cognitive biases, so the solutions are mostly to provide employees with free psychological counseling, mindfulness meditation classes, and emotional counseling. This method is actually very effective for certain groups of people. For example, newcomers who have just entered the workplace are overly anxious because they cannot keep up with the rhythm, or are psychologically repairing after encountering workplace bullying. Individual-level adjustment can indeed solve problems quickly. The "organizational interventionists" who have become increasingly popular in recent years believe that 90% of group workplace psychological problems are essentially management problems: vague boundaries of rights and responsibilities, slap-on-the-head KPIs, and an overtime culture that squeezes out personal time without limits. If these problems are not solved, no matter how much psychological counseling is provided to employees, it will only stop the fire. It is better to directly change the system level, such as setting mandatory off-duty hours, canceling unnecessary weekly and daily reports, and clarifying overtime compensation rules, which can fundamentally reduce the occurrence of psychological problems. There is no absolute right or wrong between the two ideas, but the applicable scenarios are different. If you insist on using one method to apply to all teams, it will most likely become a formalism that everyone dislikes.

To be honest, many small bosses get confused when it comes to mental health education in the workplace. They think it is a frivolous thing that only big companies can afford, and there is no need for our small team of more than a dozen people to bother with it. Last month, I also met the owner of a community auto repair shop with a total of 8 employees. The two old masters had a conflict and almost got into a fight. The bottom line is that every time the boss worked overtime during the peak season, he would pat his chest and say, "I'll treat everyone to a big dinner when I'm done." Later, he didn't do any training, so he set two rules: 50 yuan in cash for every hour of overtime work, and it would be paid together with the monthly salary. ； On the last Friday of every month, everyone has a day off in the afternoon and finds a place to drink tea and play skewers. Now, more than half a year later, there have been no conflicts in the store, and the enthusiasm of the masters has become much higher. You see, mental health education for small teams doesn’t have to be that complicated at all. Giving enough money, settling accounts, and not letting honest people suffer is more effective than anything else.

I've seen too many people misunderstand this matter. The boss thinks it's because the employees are being pretentious, and the employees think it's a new way for the company to engage in PUA. In fact, if you think about it more carefully, everyone just wants to make some money and live a stable life when they go to work. No one wants to be angry when they go to work, and have to worry about work news after work. A while ago, my friend complained to me that he took his children to an amusement park on weekends and his boss sent him a message asking him to revise the PPT. He sat on a bench in the amusement park and revised it for two hours while the child cried beside him and asked him to ride the roller coaster with him. At that moment, he almost resigned. In this case, how much mindfulness meditation would be useful for him? It is better for the company to set a rule that weekend messages for non-urgent matters can be answered on Monday, which is more practical than any psychological counseling.

Of course, there is no universal solution. After all, the situation of every industry and every team is different. Some people find it useful to take emotion management classes, while others think it is not as useful as giving an extra 500 yuan bonus every month. Some people think it is more comfortable to go to and from get off work flexibly, and some people think it is more worry-free to go to get off work at a fixed time. In the final analysis, workplace mental health education is not a high-level academic topic. It is just to help everyone find a comfortable way to get along with each other - as long as it can help everyone not feel depressed when working, rest peacefully after get off work, and not have to think about whether to leave their job every day, then it will be done.