Workplace Mental Health Training

The vast majority of formal workplace mental health training is useless. The core of truly effective training is never “teaching employees to resist stress.” Instead, it is a two-way link between “employees’ individual adjustment capabilities” and “corporate system’s fault tolerance space” that can truly reduce turnover rates and reduce internal friction within the team.

The Internet company I worked for last year encountered a typical pitfall: HR spent six figures to find a well-known lecturer in the industry to conduct a class for all employees. It started with a PPT explaining the ABC theory of emotions that everyone had heard 800 times. In the middle, there were several interactive sessions about "going on stage to share your workplace anxieties." The final after-school assignment was to write "Three things to be thankful for the company." On that day, there were more than 300 complaints about the company on the intranet, and the lecturer's golden words of "treating the company as a second home" were made into emoticons. Even the cleaning lady knew that these young people were being "mentally PUAed" again.

In fact, not only our company, but now the industry's evaluation of this type of training is polarized. The core is that the two schools of thought are completely different. One group is the "employee empowerment group" that dominates the market. It defaults that all psychological problems are caused by the employees themselves: they are not good at emotional management, have poor stress tolerance, and have an insufficiently positive attitude. Therefore, the training content includes mindfulness meditation, breathing relaxation techniques, and high emotional intelligence to deal with leadership criticism. My friend's design institute even opened a class to teach everyone "how to treat Party A's unreasonable demands as opportunities for self-improvement." The designer who had just finished revising the twelfth version of the construction drawing that day laughed out loud and said, "Am I missing a mentality?" What I lack is Party A who won’t be subject to random changes and weekends when I get off work on time.” The other school is the "organization optimization school", the mainstream idea of ​​foreign EAP (Employee Assistance Program) services, which believes that the core source of job burnout lies in the organization rather than the individual, so the management must be involved in the training: teach department leaders how to identify burnout of their subordinates. Signaling, how to allocate tasks reasonably without resorting to moral kidnapping of "more work for those who are capable", and how to give negative feedback without hurting people, this is what a small company with 30 people in Shenzhen doing SaaS does. Half of the training time is spent explaining to employees how to reasonably raise demands without internal friction, and the other half is taught to management on how to refuse invalid overtime and how to leave buffer time for projects. The voluntary turnover rate has been directly reduced from 28% to 11% for three consecutive quarters.

I have been an HRBP for almost five years and have received relevant training for three business lines. I have encountered more pitfalls than I have heard of correct principles. I have followed suit before and held a 21-day mindfulness check-in activity, requiring everyone to report to Moments every day. In the end, except for a few fresh graduates who wanted to evaluate outstanding newcomers, everyone else was just coping. There was a back-end engineer who even finished fixing a bug at 11 o'clock in the middle of the night. After searching the Internet picture, he checked in with the text "Today's mindfulness is to hope that tomorrow's product will not change the requirements randomly." Later, I slowly figured out some clues: really useful training does not require a unified class for all employees. For the sales line, it focuses on how to deal with customer rejection so as not to fall into self-denial. For the product technology line, it focuses on how to deal with the frustration of repeated changes in demand. For the middle and back offices, it talks about how to balance the conflict of multi-department docking. Instead, the kind of "workplace happiness course" that is applicable to all people, nine out of ten are just water courses.

Of course, some people say that it is better to directly raise salaries than to do these things in vain. There is nothing wrong with this. Existing academic research has long produced data: when company wages are more than 30% lower than industry levels, the effectiveness of even the best mental health intervention is less than 10%. To put it bluntly, training has never been a fig leaf to cover up management problems. If legal overtime pay is not paid and 999 is mandatory every day, no matter how hard you teach employees to adjust their mentality, it will be in vain.

Don't tell me, the little nameless event we did last year actually had the best effect. At that time, the technical line had three consecutive iterations to catch up with the version, and several people expressed their intention to leave. We did not do any formal training, so we hired a blogger who had worked in a big factory as a back-end and later switched to psychological consulting. We set up a small conference room and set up a bunch of milk tea and fried chicken. There were no PPTs and no speaking sessions. Everyone sat there and chatted. Some people say that the last time a bug appeared online, I was so scared that I couldn't sleep for three days, and I panicked when I heard the company WeChat ring. ； Some people say that every time a leader sends a request ten minutes before getting off work, he really wants to smash the keyboard. The blogger didn't make any sense, and just said, "When I was working on the backend, there was a bug that caused the entire platform to crash. Half a month's bonus was deducted from me. I squatted downstairs in the company and ate three skewers that day before I recovered. Really, the sky is not falling." After that event, the three young men who mentioned their resignation finally stayed. They said that for the first time, they felt that the company really cared about what they thought, instead of just shouting slogans to tell everyone to "work hard."

To put it bluntly, workplace mental health training has never been a tool to give employees blood and teach them "tolerance". To put it bluntly, it is just a small incision: do you really treat employees as human beings, rather than as tools to complete KPIs? Everyone can understand it by sitting there and listening in ten minutes. There is no need to use fancy names, and there is no need to force employees to write down their experiences. It can really capture everyone's emotions, which is better than anything else.