Workplace mental health education

The core of workplace mental health education has never been "to persuade employees to endure stress and improve their ability to withstand stress to match job requirements." Instead, it focuses on both individual cognitive calibration and organizational rule optimization to help practitioners establish implementable workplace stress buffering mechanisms, and ultimately achieve a two-way positive cycle of individual professional status and organizational operating efficiency. This is the most practical conclusion I have come to after running more than 20 workplace psychological service projects in different industries and talking to nearly 100 practitioners, HR, and psychological workers.

Many people still have the impression of this concept from a few years ago: find a lecturer to talk in a conference room for an afternoon, the PPT is full of "empty cup mentality" and "be grateful to the company", the employees in the audience either take advantage of it or roll their eyes, and write 500 words of reflections at the end, which is a complete waste of time. It’s no wonder that everyone is biased. In the early days, many companies did this, essentially treating psychological education as “ideological work”, with the purpose of allowing employees to “make less trouble and work more.” The direction was fundamentally distorted.

There are actually two voices in the industry that are very noisy at present: one is the psychological workers who prefer individual intervention. They believe that the core of workplace stress is individual cognitive bias and insufficient emotional regulation ability. As long as everyone is taught mindful breathing, emotional dismantling, and boundary establishment methods, 80% of the problems can be solved.； The other type is researchers who are more interested in organizational management. They believe that the root cause of most workplace psychological problems is the unreasonable system - it is obvious that the living pressure of three people is given to one person, and it is obvious that the leader is blaming the blame and unclear about the rights and responsibilities. If you let the employees adjust their emotions, they are essentially helping the company to blame. This is no different from the PUA logic of "you are bullied because you are not strong enough".

Both statements are supported by actual cases. I know a planner who is responsible for connecting with Party A. I used to be so angry with Party A’s weird demands every day that my breasts hurt. I learned “topic separation” from a teacher who did individual intervention for 3 months. Now when I hear unreasonable demands when connecting, my first reaction is not “ Why am I so useless and can't handle it?" Instead, "This demand does not meet the previously agreed upon scope. Either more money will be added or it will be postponed. I am angry because I am punishing myself for the other party's mistakes." Now the breast nodules in her physical examination report are all smaller. Do you think it is useless? So useful. But last year, a leading Internet company held a mindfulness class for employees during the layoff window, teaching everyone to "accept changes and lower expectations." This was directly scolded by employees and became a hot search topic. The reason is also very simple: I am about to be laid off and barely have enough to eat. What do you want me to accept? When talking about individual adjustment at this time, it doesn’t just mean standing and talking without back pain.

What’s interesting is that the three or four companies I’ve come into contact with in the past two years that are doing well all use methods from these two schools together. An HR friend from a state-owned enterprise told me that when they launched a workplace mental health project last year, the first step was not to start classes at all. Instead, they first wrote "employees are not required to reply to work messages during non-working hours" and "overtime applications must be approved in advance, and overtime work must be compensated on an equal basis" in the employee handbook. The loopholes in the rules that are most likely to cause emotional conflicts were filled first, and then they opened a few classes on emotional regulation and family-work balance. According to a survey at the end of the year, satisfaction related to workplace stress increased by 23%. There is also an EAP (Employee Assistance Program) specialist at an Internet company who said that they had done more than ten mindfulness meditation classes before, and the participation rate was less than 10%. Later, they directly changed the class to practical content such as "How to respond with high emotional intelligence when being dumped", "Speech templates for asking the boss for a salary increase" and "How to take a quick break during high-intensity work periods". The participation rate jumped to 60%. After the class, many employees actually went back to fight for more resources with their bosses, and their anxiety naturally decreased.

Last time, a little girl who worked in an audit complained to me, saying that her company used to teach people to take a deep breath to adjust their mentality when they were scolded by a client. She raised her hand on the spot and asked the teacher: "The information the client wants is to make 100 drafts in 3 days. Can I finish it if I take a deep breath?" ”The teacher got stuck on the spot. You see, talking about emotional regulation apart from actual problems is essentially castles in the air.

A few days ago, I had dinner with a teacher who has been an EAP for 8 years. She said that the most taboo thing in workplace mental health education now is "standing and talking." Don't come up and try to reason with people. First, listen to what the employees are most hurting at the moment: whether they are being dumped and don't know how to deal with it, whether they are anxious about not being able to complete the KPI setting, or whether they are working overtime and have no time to spend with their families. Giving specific solutions first, and then talking about emotional adjustment is better than anything else.

To put it bluntly, workplace mental health education has never been some lofty metaphysics, nor is it a company’s stability tool, nor is it a chicken soup for the soul that makes employees endure. It is more like a set of "protective equipment" for people in the workplace: it not only teaches you how to wear protective clothing to block unnecessary emotional harm, but also helps you make requests to the company and smooth out those "thorny rules" that can hurt people - after all, rather than asking employees to learn to "sleep on rocks", removing the rocks first is the real solution to the problem.