Workplace Mental Health Training

Currently, 62% of similar trainings purchased by domestic enterprises are ineffective investments that "look politically correct but have no practical effect." The remaining trainings that can truly reduce turnover rates and reduce internal friction are not just about giving employees chicken soup and talking about emotional introspection. The core must also meet the three fulcrums of "adjustment tools that employees can directly use", "calibration of management behavioral boundaries" and "company system rules". Any missing one is a waste of money.

Last year, when I was doing an internal mental state survey for a SaaS company in Tianhe, Guangzhou, their HR person in charge asked me to complain, saying that they had just spent 200,000 the previous year to find a well-known mind-body and soul institution to do 3 training sessions. They also asked everyone to meditate with their eyes closed to "link the company's energy", and they also had to write gratitude cards to their direct leaders. The director originally wanted to improve employee satisfaction at the end of the year, but three months later the turnover rate for core technical positions increased by 12%. One employee who resigned directly wrote in the questionnaire, "I was just a little tired after working overtime. After the training, I found out that the company felt that I was tired because I was not grateful enough to the company, and I didn't want to stay anymore."

In fact, there are huge differences in this matter in the industry. One group holds the view of the majority of corporate administrative HR: they believe that psychological training is originally a "soft benefit". It is essentially a caring gesture for employees to cope with regulatory requirements. Employees with serious psychological problems will naturally find a hospital on their own. There is no need to spend too much money on it and just go through the motions. The other side is the view of an EAP service provider with a background in clinical psychology: All psychological training that does not involve the adjustment of organizational rules and only requires employees to adjust their mentality is essentially to make employees take medicine for "organizational diseases". If not, it may turn into secondary harm to employees, and should not be done at all.

The best training I have ever seen was conducted at no cost. It was conducted by a small cross-border e-commerce company with more than 30 people in Yuhang, Hangzhou. The boss himself is an operator and knows that what everyone is most afraid of is the need for temporary interruptions, cross-department blame-shifting, and non-stop work news after get off work. Their training was divided into two parts. First, they held a two-hour meeting with all management. They did not talk about anything else, but just three points: First, employees are not allowed to send messages for non-emergency matters after get off work. If someone does not reply after sending messages, it cannot be considered a work attitude problem. ； Secondly, don’t give employees the poisonous chicken soup of “treating the company as a family”. We are in an employment relationship. When talking about money, just talk about money. Don’t talk about emotions. ； Third, if a subordinate raises a request for psychological pressure, refer it to HR immediately. You are not allowed to blindly do "ideological work" for others. The training for ordinary employees is more practical, and several templates are provided for immediate use: how to politely refuse work that is not yours from other departments, how to apply for one day of paid "emotional leave" per month, who to contact if you encounter a PUA in the workplace and how long it will take to get feedback. With just two training sessions that took less than 4 hours in total, their turnover rate in core positions fell directly from 28% to 11%, and the score for "work pressure" in employee satisfaction increased by more than 40 points.

Of course, I have also seen many employees who don’t buy it at all, and even complain on the Internet that “it’s better to just give me a 500 yuan salary increase than to do these messy trainings.” I actually agree with this statement. After all, many times the psychological pressure in the workplace is essentially not enough money, or they live too much and have too little money, or they have been wronged and the money is not enough. At this time, no matter how much you try to regulate your emotions, it will be in vain. But conversely, there are also some problems that cannot be solved by a salary increase. I have been in contact with a product manager whose monthly salary is more than 30,000 yuan. Even though the annual salary is almost 500,000 yuan, she still suffers from anxiety and insomnia every day. The reason is that two leaders assign conflicting tasks to her every day, and she will be scolded no matter what she does. No matter how much you raise her salary, she will be upset or upset.

Oh, by the way, I have also seen a particularly outrageous training. It was conducted by a manufacturing company in Suzhou last year. I don’t know what kind of pheasant organization was found to drag employees to a team building base in the suburbs for "psychological therapy." They actually asked everyone to talk about their childhood trauma in public. After speaking, they had to hug their direct leaders and say, "Thank you for tolerating me." "At that time, a little girl couldn't stop crying after talking about how she was ignored by her parents when she was a child. The boss patted her on the shoulder and said, "From now on, the company will be your home." The little girl resigned on the spot and said, "I just came to work, why are you taking my privacy?" You said this is not mental health training, this is clearly a public execution.

In fact, to put it bluntly, many companies have reversed the nature of workplace mental health training. This thing has never been about "treating" employees. It is essentially a physical examination of the entire company's organizational structure and management style. You can't just ask employees to take off their clothes and draw blood during the physical examination, and the boss and management stand by as referees, so the real problems will definitely not be found. As for whether to do it and how much to spend on it, to put it bluntly, there is one criterion: do you really want to solve everyone's stress problem by doing this training, or do you just want to take a photo and post it on a public account to tell the outside world that "our company is very caring". The starting point is different, and the results are naturally different.