Workplace mental health assessment questions

The core questions of the formal workplace mental health assessment are composed of 28 standardized screening questions in 4 general dimensions + 12 validity check questions (lie detection questions). It does not contain any subjective judgment content. The assessment results are only used for risk warning and cannot be used as a basis for diagnosis of mental illness. These questions have been verified by millions of samples after decades of academic accumulation. They have a unified norm control and are not just entertainment questions created by some blogger.

I have been working as an enterprise EAP service for almost 6 years, and I have encountered too many people who misunderstood this assessment. They either thought it was a tool used by the company to PUA employees, or they used the 10 questions randomly found on the Internet to "test whether you are severely depressed" to apply to themselves. They were so scared that they wanted to resign. However, when measured with a formal scale, it was staged burnout caused by working overtime for two consecutive weeks, and it did not even touch the anxiety threshold.

Oh, by the way, many people think that there will be irritating questions like "Have you ever thought about committing suicide" in the assessment. In fact, formal workplace assessments will not include such content at all. Firstly, it will easily arouse the resistance of the people being tested. Secondly, people who are really inclined will most likely deliberately conceal it and cannot ask the truth at all. Therefore, all questions are judged through concrete behaviors such as sleep, mood swings, and work status.

In fact, there have always been two completely different voices in the academic community regarding the logic of setting questions for workplace assessments. No one is right or wrong, but they are just approached from different angles. People who engage in clinical psychology believe that symptoms must be screened first. After all, people who are really prone to moderate to severe depression and anxiety are prone to accidents while carrying out high-pressure work. Therefore, the questions they ask are all without any guiding behavioral descriptions. They will not ask you such nonsense as "Do you think you are mentally healthy?" The answer is all yours. Those that can directly correspond to your own life, such as "In the past two weeks, how many days have you spent after get off work ruminating over details that you didn't do well at work, or lying in bed for more than half an hour unable to sleep?" The options are directly divided by frequency, and even the degree of emotion is framed for you to prevent you from subjectively amplifying your feelings.

The group of people who engage in organizational behavior don’t see it that way. They think that 80% of emotional problems in the workplace are adaptation problems. It’s not that there’s something wrong with you, but that you don’t fit in with the position, team, and company culture. So their questions are more focused on measuring the degree of fit, such as “In the past month, have you ever had a job that you were good at?” "Do you think your work results can be fairly evaluated by your immediate superiors?" If you get a low score on these types of questions, there is a high probability that you will not have any problems if you find a suitable job, and there is no need to label yourself as "mentally unhealthy". Last year, we conducted an employee evaluation for an e-commerce company. There was a customer service girl whose clinical scores were almost all on the high-risk line. According to the standards, one-on-one psychological counseling was immediately arranged. After talking with each other, we found out that her team received after-sales service for the 618 sales last month. After 21 days of continuous work, she received more than 100 angry complaint calls every day, which would have ruined anyone else's life. Later, the company adjusted their team rotation and added special performance bonuses. After taking the test half a month later, her score returned to the normal level. Do you think this can be blamed on her mental fragility? Obviously the job arrangement is unreasonable.

By the way, there will definitely be a few seemingly inexplicable validity check questions mixed in with the formal assessment, which are also commonly known as lie detection questions, such as "I can concentrate on it for 8 hours every time I go to work" and "I have never had any problems with the leadership's arrangements." "Dissatisfied", if you select "fully consistent" for all these questions, then your answer sheet will be basically invalid. It does not mean that you are dishonest, but that you did not care at all when answering, or deliberately pretended to be a "perfect employee", and the results have no reference value.

Of course, this assessment has received a lot of criticism now. Many people say that the company's entry test is disguised discrimination. I have also encountered this kind of bad thing. There was a fresh graduate who was just a little socially anxious. When he took the adaptation question, he chose "I don't like to socialize with colleagues outside of work." The company HR said that he was "mentally unhealthy and not suitable for the team." "Collaboration" is the reason for rejection. This is purely a blind use of assessment by the company. There is no "unhealthy" conclusion in the assessment results itself. There are only "high risk", "medium risk" and "low risk". And there are many types of high risk. People who are afraid of society may do better in design and R&D than people who love socializing. People who are blind only mean that HR is not professional. But on the other hand, I have to say that early screening can indeed avoid many tragedies. Three years ago, an Internet company came to us for a review and said that it had hired a salesperson before. When he joined the company, he concealed his history of severe depression. In the third month after joining the company, the leader said something because his performance was not up to standard. He swallowed sleeping pills in the tea room and was eventually rescued, but both the employee and the company were exhausted. If they had done a formal assessment at that time and known the risks in advance, either assigned him a low-pressure position or communicated with him in advance about protective measures, we would never have reached that point.

To be honest, the assessment itself is a tool, and its quality depends entirely on how the user operates it. If you want to test it yourself, don’t believe in the 9.9 paid tests on the Internet, just look for free public welfare tests on the regular EAP platform. Even if the test is high-risk, don’t panic. Think about whether you have stayed up late and been under too much pressure recently. Adjust it for two weeks before taking the test. If it still doesn’t work, go talk to a professional consultant. After all, you are at work, and who is not so irritable that you want to turn over the table? Don’t take it too seriously, and don’t take it completely seriously.