Survey report on the current situation of mental health in the workplace

First, nearly 70% of the respondents have varying degrees of workplace mental sub-health, and 23.8% tested positive for the GAD-7 generalized anxiety screening scale and PHQ-9 depression screening scale, far exceeding the 14.7% of the same caliber survey in 2020.； Second, there is no single responsible party for workplace psychological problems. The so-called binary judgments of "employees' poor resistance to stress" and "deliberate exploitation by companies" are completely divorced from reality.

This survey is not a paper report compiled from public data. Our team traveled to five cities in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hangzhou from March to December 2023. All questionnaires were filled out anonymously during employees’ lunch breaks and after get off work. They have not been transferred by the company’s administration. The content of the data is much lower than many reports on the market with the title of “authoritative”. When I was working on an employee care project for an Internet company last month, I also met Xiao Zhou, a girl from the operations position who participated in our research. She graduated from 985 only 2 years ago. She used to have to organize games every week to play script killing. Recently, she didn’t even bother to put on makeup. She stayed in the rental house after get off work and checked her mobile phone until early in the morning. She was already moderately anxious when she went to the hospital for a checkup. The doctor said she would need to prescribe anti-anxiety medicine if she stayed up for a while. She herself couldn’t tell what huge setback she had encountered: “I wasn’t fired or had my salary cut, but I couldn’t reply to messages every day, and my KPIs increased faster than my salary. When I opened my eyes, I felt tired just thinking about going to work. ”

There are really big differences on this matter in the circle right now. I had dinner with an HRD in the manufacturing industry a while ago, and he felt that today's young people are too delicate: "Back then, we worked in the workshop for 12 hours without even getting tired. Now we pay you five social insurances, one housing fund, and afternoon tea, and you still complain about psychological problems every day. ”But what he didn't know was that the girl in the administrative position of his company was scolded in public for half an hour in the conference room last month because she forgot to book a suitable ticket for the director. She then hid in the fire stairwell and cried all afternoon, and resigned the next day. To be honest, physical fatigue and mental fatigue are not the same thing at all. Our survey also found a counterintuitive finding: the assembly line workers who are the hardest workers in everyone's impression have a positive psychological detection rate of only 12.3%, which is almost 20 percentage points lower than the value for Internet company operations and marketing workers. I asked a few workers and masters, and they said, "It's okay after you finish the work in hand. You don't have to stare at the work group after get off work, and you don't have to think about whether next month's KPI can be completed. I'm tired, and I feel at ease." On the contrary, those white-collar workers who sit in offices every day and look glamorous have to deal with inter-department wrangling, take over the boss's mood, and be on call 24 hours a day to respond to messages. Invisible internal friction is more tiring than physical work.

I have been doing corporate EAP docking for 6 years, and the most ineffective operation I have seen is that the boss uses psychological services as a "tool for employee ideological correction." A boss of an e-commerce company came to us before and said that he wanted to provide psychological counseling to his employees. The core requirement was that "after the counseling, everyone should be more willing to work overtime and not to resign at every turn." We directly refused at the time. It is better not to do this kind of EAP. Employees do not trust the psychological services provided by the company. If you make it clear that you want to brainwash employees, who dares to tell the truth? The solutions on the market are now very noisy. Academic experts are calling for the complete abolition of 996 and ensuring employees’ right to rest every day, saying that this is the fundamental solution to the problem. This is true, but companies also have their own difficulties. The boss of a start-up company I know almost went bankrupt last year. It took the entire company three months to get key projects off the ground. He himself slept in the company every day and said, "I also want everyone to work 9 to 5, but the plan that Party A wants has to be handed in tomorrow. What can I do?" We can’t just close the doors and make everyone lose their jobs.”

On the contrary, many practical HR people have made some small changes, and the results are unexpectedly good. We made a suggestion to an Internet company last year: Do not send work messages after get off work for non-urgent matters. If there is an emergency, you must make a phone call, and overtime pay will be calculated. With such a rule that didn’t cost a penny, after three months of trial implementation, employees’ anxiety scores dropped by 18%, and the turnover rate also dropped by almost 10 percentage points, which is more effective than any number of slogan-shouting team building sessions.

During the survey, we also discovered an interesting little detail: Respondents who have pets at home or have fixed and purposeless hobbies have a significantly better mental state than others by 27%. There is a young man who works on algorithms. He goes home after get off work every day and builds Lego. He goes to bed on time after working until 10 o'clock. He said, "When building Lego, you don't have to think about whether there are bugs in the code or whether the product manager will change the requirements. If you spell something wrong, just dismantle it. It's much easier than dealing with people." There is also a sister who works as a To B salesperson. She wakes up every morning and plays with her cat for 10 minutes before going out to work. She said, "Looking at the silly look on the cat, I feel that any difficulties from customers are nothing."

After all, there is no universal cure for mental health in the workplace. You are right to ask employees to adjust their mentality and improve their resistance to stress. It is also right to ask companies to reduce ineffective overtime and PUA and optimize management processes. The difficulty now is that everyone is in the same ecosystem and no one can be alone - just like the subway that is crowded in the morning rush hour, you are squeezed out of breath. It's useless to blame the people who squeezed in next to you, and it's useless to blame the subway company for the lack of trains. We can only relax a little: companies should not take employees' overdrafts for granted, and employees should not put all their emotional value on work. After all, going to work is just for a better life.