Workplace Mental Health B2B Services

The current domestic workplace mental health B2B services are essentially no longer a "welfare gimmick" used by companies to care for employees, but a rigid production-oriented investment that can simultaneously cover cost reduction (reduce direct losses caused by turnover, inefficiency, and extreme events), efficiency improvement (increase team collaboration, innovation output efficiency), and compliance (adapt to the latest occupational health protection regulations).； And there is no universal solution for the industry. Only services designed in layers that combine enterprise stage, industry attributes, and employee portraits can truly achieve results.

Don’t believe it, I took over a cross-border e-commerce company in Hangzhou last year with 120 employees. The boss initially scoffed at this thing and said, “My salary is 20% higher than my peers, so what kind of psychological services do I need? ”As a result, in the first half of last year, the turnover rate of the customer service team alone reached 42%, and the cost of recruiting new employees and pre-job training alone was 280,000 yuan, not counting the hidden loss of customers after the old employees left.

Later, with the mentality of giving it a try, we built a set of mixed-mode psychological services: a dedicated one-on-one psychological consultation portal for front-line customer service twice a week, a 10-minute mindfulness meditation guided audio in the evening duty room, a monthly stress management workshop for middle-level employees, and quarterly exclusive psychological coaching services for senior executives. After 3 months, the customer service turnover rate dropped to 18%. The boss calculated it himself. The recruitment + churn cost saved was 3.7 times the initial service investment.

Interestingly, the service providers currently engaged in this field are actually divided into two distinct schools, and no one can convince the other.

One group is the traditional "medical group". They are basically veteran players who have been in the EAP (Employee Assistance Program) for more than ten years. There are a lot of certified psychological counselors in the team, which emphasize the professionalism of the service and the rigor of the process. They have complete SOPs from onboarding psychological assessment and filing to post-intervention and extreme event handling. They are suitable for large companies with thousands of employees and extremely high compliance requirements, such as Tencent and Byte's internal psychological service core suppliers. The advantage is that it has a strong ability to avoid risks. If it encounters extreme situations such as depression or suicidal tendencies among employees, it can intervene according to standard procedures to avoid corporate liability. ； But the shortcomings are also obvious. The whole process is too much like "seeing a doctor", and employees have strong resistance. After many companies bought it, the annual utilization rate was less than 5%, and the money was basically wasted.

The other group is the new "scenario group" players that have emerged in the past two years. They take the light service route, such as workstation meditation cabins, Friday mood tree days, office pampering days, and improvisational comedy decompression team building. They incorporate psychological intervention into daily office scenes, without employees taking the initiative to "make an appointment for medical treatment." Mimi can relieve emotions. Many small and medium-sized Internet, cultural and creative companies have used it and the usage rate has increased to more than 30%. But the shortcomings are also quite prominent: there is no standardized effect evaluation system, and it is easy to stray into formalism. I have seen a game company buy two meditation cabins before, and they eventually became a place where everyone hides in them to take a nap and fish, and it does not have the effect of psychological intervention at all.

I have participated in the implementation projects of nearly 20 companies. To be honest, there is really no need to take sides, only what suits you is useful. For example, the cross-border e-commerce company mentioned earlier combines the advantages of the two groups: front-line employees use the light services of the scene group to reduce their resistance. They spend 2 minutes before getting off work every day to check in the mood card in the group. When the system recognizes negative emotions, it will automatically push light soothing content. , if employees have further needs, they will be transferred to the medical school’s professional consultants for one-on-one intervention. Middle-level and senior managers will directly use the medical school’s systematic assessment and intervention. This will not make employees feel that “the company thinks I am mentally ill”, and they will be able to cope with problems when they really arise.

Nowadays, many bosses still have a misunderstanding: they think that it is enough for me to provide high salary and benefits, and that providing psychological services is superfluous. But the data from the mental health survey of workplace workers released by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security last year is here: 41% of workers in the top 30% of the industry in terms of salary level have moderate or above anxiety. The core source is not insufficient money at all, but problems such as internal friction in the workplace, promotion bottlenecks, and blurred boundaries between work and life. These cannot be solved by salary increases. Some companies think that just one team building or a psychological lecture is enough. The most outrageous case I have heard before is that of a design institute. In order to relieve the pressure of employees, they organized a team building hike for all employees. They were required to participate in the team building and were not allowed to take leave in the middle. At the end, they had to write their thoughts and post them on WeChat. In the end, the employees were scolded on Maimai, saying, "Even to relax, I have to follow the boss's requirements, which makes me even more anxious."

Talking back to the current status of the industry, the current penetration rate of domestic workplace mental health B2B service companies is less than 3%, while the penetration rate in developed countries in Europe and the United States is about 35%. The gap seems large, but the growth rate is really fast. The entire market size will increase by 78% year-on-year in 2023, especially in 2020. After the newly revised "Occupational Disease Prevention and Control Law" included work-related psychological diseases in the scope of occupational disease monitoring, many manufacturing, financial, and Internet companies took the initiative to come to their door. After all, if an employee had an extreme incident due to work stress, the money lost would be enough to buy several years of psychological services.

Of course, don't think of this thing as a panacea. If the company's own management system has problems, and the boss is PUA every day and works overtime until he has no time to sleep, no matter how good the psychological service is, it will be useless - after all, you can't let a consultant follow the employee every day to help him digest the boss's scolding, right? To put it bluntly, workplace mental health services are just the "icing on the cake". At the bottom level, companies must really treat their employees as human beings, not as consumables, so that the money spent can be useful.