Questionnaire on the Current Situation of Mental Health in the Workplace

Nearly 70% of the interviewed workplace workers suffer from moderate or above occupational burnout, and only 18% of the respondents have received formal psychological support at the corporate level. The differences in psychological pressure pain points in different industries and positions are far greater than the commonalities. There is no "one-size-fits-all" improvement plan that applies to all workplace people.

Have many people had this experience: I just sat down at my desk on Monday morning and stared at the screen for a long time without typing a word. I obviously didn't stay up late the day before, but I just couldn't get enough energy. I went home from get off work and slumped on the sofa. I didn't even have the energy to watch a short video. When a friend asked me to have dinner, I just wanted to say "forget it, I'm too tired." This kind of "tiredness" we often call is the most typical manifestation of professional exhaustion.

When many people mention psychological problems in the workplace, their first reaction is that "Internet people suffer 996 problems." Don't tell me, the results of our survey are really not the case. The production team leader of the auto parts factory in the Yangtze River Delta, Zhou Zhou, is 36 years old and supervises 27 assembly line workers. His anxiety score is 17% higher than the average of the Internet operation positions in our survey. When he filled in the opening questions, he wrote that there was a minor safety accident in the team last month, and he was deducted from his performance for the whole month. He wrote a 3,000-word review, and had to file claims for workers who were slightly injured. When he returned home, he had to deal with the rebellious period of his son who had just entered junior high school. "Now my heart skips a beat when I hear the notification tone of the WeChat work group, and I have to turn on my mobile phone when I sleep, because I am afraid that the factory will call me in the middle of the night."

The current views on this matter are actually quite divided. Many business managers believe that the so-called psychological problem in the workplace is that young people have poor resistance to stress. "We didn't even get overtime pay back then, and we didn't say we had any psychological problems in the workshop every day." 22% of the respondents held this view, and most of them were middle- and senior-level managers over 40 years old. But professionals working in EAP (employee assistance programs) on the other side completely disagree, saying that the workload and uncertainty of people in the workplace today are completely different from those 20 years ago, and we cannot look at problems from the old perspective.

We pulled the corresponding data: the average daily working hours of the interviewed professionals in 2023 will be 1.2 hours more than in 2019, and their discretionary personal time will be 2.1 hours less. They also have to face common anxieties such as industry contraction, project cancellations, and the 35-year-old threshold that were not available before. It is really untenable to blame all problems on "personal stress resistance".

But don’t think that EAP is a panacea. Several companies in our survey spent hundreds of thousands to purchase EAP services for the whole year, providing offline lectures and online psychological consultations. As a result, the employee utilization rate was less than 5%, and 32% of the respondents said that "it takes up my time to listen to lectures after get off work, which makes it more annoying." On the other hand, Xiao Song, the HRBP of an Internet company in Hangzhou, found a more effective method on her own: she applied for two "unreasonable emotional leaves" from her department every month. She didn't have to fill out a sick leave form and didn't have to explain the reasons to her boss. She could take the leave if she told her one day in advance, and no attendance bonus would be deducted. After half a year of implementation, the turnover rate of their department dropped directly from the previous 38% to 12%, and the career burnout score was 34% lower than that of other departments. “In fact, what everyone wants is a step up. If there are people who take emotional leave for two consecutive months, we will also talk to them privately whether it is due to too much workload or family matters. It is more effective than any high-level lectures." When Xiao Song said this, I felt that it was more genuine than what I had heard from all the EAP experts.

During the survey, there was a 24-year-old girl in the operation position. She wrote a sentence in the final open question that left a deep impression on me: "Last Thursday, I secretly cried at my workstation for 20 minutes. My colleagues around me pretended not to notice. The sister sitting next to me secretly handed me a pack of tissue paper. That day, I suddenly felt that I could continue in this class." If the company had instituted a rule about not showing negative emotions at work, I might have resigned on the same day." You see, many times what people want is not professional psychological counseling at all, but just a little space to be respected.

In fact, after this survey, our biggest feeling is that workplace mental health has never been an employee benefit that needs to be hung on the wall, nor is it a KPI that HR makes up at the end of the year. It is a very specific little thing: it is the boss when working overtime until late at night. Will you ask if you want to call a car for you? Will you find the problem together instead of scolding someone when a project goes wrong? Will you dare to speak out when you feel wrong instead of being labeled as "glassy" or "unable to handle things"? Nowadays, many companies have turned this matter into a large project worth hundreds of thousands, and conduct various check-ins and assessments, but they are getting further and further away from real working people.

Oh, by the way, if you also have something related to workplace emotions that you want to talk about, you can also leave a message in the comment area. Our subsequent surveys will also add everyone’s true feelings into it. After all, in the final analysis, each workplace person’s own feelings are the most important in this matter.